Stellar parenting: Making new stars by 'adopting' stray cosmic gases

Among the most striking objects in the universe are glittering, dense swarms of stars known as globular clusters. Astronomers had long thought globular clusters formed their millions of stars in bulk at around the same time, with each cluster's stars having very similar ages, much like twin brothers and sisters. Yet recent discoveries of young stars in old globular clusters have scrambled this tidy picture.