Astronomy Cast: Mysteries of the Milky Way

Globular clusters are thought to be a large group of stars all formed at the same time. Blue stragglers are stars in globular clusters that are still on the main sequence where they don’t belong. They are blue and big and massive stars. They may have formed when two other stars collided or a merger of two stars. Statistics point towards it, but there is no visual evidence.There should be 2 to 3 supernovae every century in the Milky Way. The last one seen was in 1680 and one in 1987 in the Magellanic Cloud. We’re missing 10 supernovae statistically. Some may be hidden by gas and dust and could be hidden where we can’t see them.We don’t know for sure if the Magellanic Clouds are satellites of the Milky Way. They may not be gravitationally bound to the Milky Way or to each other, but sometimes it seems like they are. They have more active star formation than the Milky Way does.