©NASA, ESA, and D. de Mello (Catholic University of America/GSFC)

Mysterious "blue blobs" about 12 million light-years away are actually clusters of orphan stars that formed in an unlikely part of the universe, new images released today reveal.

The blobs were spotted near a galaxy called M82 using the Very Large Array of radio telescopes and the GALEX space telescope, which showed the objects' ultraviolet glow. An analysis of archived high-resolution images from the Hubble Space Telescope then revealed that the blobs were clusters of mostly young stars.

Scientists were surprised by the find, because the clusters of bright, massive stars sit along a wispy bridge of gases connecting M82 to two other galaxies it collided with 200 million years ago.

This means that the stars are "in the middle of nowhere," lead study author Duilia de Mello of Catholic University told reporters today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

Astronomers have long thought that stars formed only inside dense clouds of material within galaxies. But "the blue blobs are stars outside galaxies. These ones are weird," Mello said.

The gas streamers should be too thin to create the gravitational forces needed to build so many stars. So Mello and colleagues think that the stars formed when turbulence in the gas bridge created regions dense enough to trigger stellar birth.

What's more, Mello said, the blobs could be "the polluters of the universe" - expelling heavy elements generated as the stars burn into the interstellar medium when they go supernova.