The Case of the Missing Stars

It seems that globular clusters in the Fornax galaxy cluster are missing some stars. The population of these globular clusters is split equally between old stars and new stars. This does not fit in with current theories on the formation of those objects. Until now, scientists assumed that the stars in globular clusters all formed at the same time, and that most, if not all the stars would be old. Any new stars would form from ejected star material, but theories predicted that old stars should outnumber new stars considerably. Observationally, that isn't the case for Fornax.

It's actually not the case for the Milky Way's globular clusters, either. They have a similar star make-up, but scientists assumed that something caused the clusters to lose older stars. They can't make the same assumption for Fornax, because there's nowhere the stars could have gone where we couldn't detect them. They're just not there. So, it may take some serious rethinking to figure out how these globular clusters actually formed.

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