Milky Way Galaxy Stellar associationsastronomy

Even younger than open clusters, stellar associations are very loose groupings of young stars that share a common place and time of origin but that are not generally tied closely enough together gravitationally to form a stable cluster. Stellar associations are limited strictly to the plane of the Galaxy and appear only in regions of the system where star formation is occurring, notably in the spiral arms. They are very luminous objects. The brightest are even brighter than the brightest globular clusters, but this is not because they contain more stars; instead it is the result of the fact that their constituent stars are very much brighter than the stars constituting globular clusters. The most luminous stars in stellar associations are very young stars of spectral types O and B. They have absolute luminosities as bright as any star in the Galaxy—on the order of one million times the luminosity of the Sun. Such stars have very short lifetimes, only lasting a few million years. With luminous stars of this type there need not be very many to make up a highly luminous and conspicuous grouping. The total masses of stellar associations amount to only a few hundred solar masses, with the population of stars being in the hundreds or, in a few cases, thousands.

The sizes of stellar associations are large; the average diameter of those in the Galaxy is about 250 light-years. They are so large and loosely structured that their self-gravitation is insufficient to hold them together, and in a matter of a few million years the members disperse into surrounding space, becoming separate and unconnected stars in the galactic field.