Scientists may have solved star age gap mystery

Artist's impression of collision

Scientists think that they have solved a mystery about a pair of stars.

Pairs of stars, like twins, are usually the same age, but this pair of stars known as the HD 148937-star system is a bit strange.

The two stars, instead of being the same age, are 1.4 million years apart.

But researchers and scientists now think that they have figured out the mystery.

Read on to find out why.

The research team think that these stars had a violent past involving a third star- they believe that this star system originally had three stars instead of just two.

But around 2.6 million years ago two of the stars crashed and became one. This crash would have created a "beautiful cloud of gas and dust".

This crash also meant that the newly formed star gained a magnetic field.

It is rare for massive stars like this to have a magnetic field but scientists believe that a crash where two stars merge could make this happen.

This is the first time that scientists have been able to find evidence to show this.

The data which scientists used came from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) which is a very large telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

This telescope is made up of four telescopes which can detect objects that are very far away.

Dr Abigail Frost, an astronomer at the ESO in Chile, added: "A nebula surrounding two massive stars is a rarity, and it really made us feel like something cool had to have happened in this system."