Article by: Andacs Robert Eugen, on 25 May 2022, at 12:34 pm Los Angeles time

A new study by scientists at the University of Copenhagen can change our perception of many important things in our Universe, including black holes, supernovae, galaxies, and more.

All of these are directly or indirectly related to the stars, the subject on which this study focused almost entirely.

Much of the Universe is influenced by stars and their phenomena.

Since 1995, astronomers have assumed that stars far away from us are similar to those in our galaxy, with massive, medium, and small star sizes, but the new study says something else.

Analyzing more than 140,000 galaxies in our Universe using the COSMOS catalog, astronomers at the University of Copenhagen have discovered that stars far away from us have found that distant stars are much more massive than previously known.

"The mass of stars tells us, astronomers, a lot. If you change mass, you also change the number of supernovae and black holes that arise out of massive stars. As such, our result means that we'll have to revise many of the things we once presumed because distant galaxies look quite different from our own," says Albert Sneppen, a graduate student at the Niels Bohr Institute and first author of the study.

"We've only been able to see the tip of the iceberg and known for a long time that expecting other galaxies to look like our own was not a particularly good assumption to make. However, no one has ever been able to prove that other galaxies form different populations of stars. This study has allowed us to do just that, which may open the door for a deeper understanding of galaxy formation and evolution," says Associate Professor Charles Steinhardt, a co-author of the study.

"Now that we are better able to decode the mass of stars, we can see a new pattern; the least massive galaxies continue to form stars, while the more massive galaxies stop birthing new stars. This suggests a remarkably universal trend in the death of galaxies," also said Sneppen.

Source: IOPSCIENCE