Astronomers detect a bright-blue bridge of stars, and it's about to blow - Livescience.com

Astrophysicists have found a new region of the Milky Way, and it's filled with searingly hot, bright-blue stars that are about to explode.

Nestled between the Orion Arm — where our solar system is— and the constellation Perseus, the spur is a belt between two spiral arms filled with enormous stars three times the size of the sun and colored blue by their blistering heat.

Astronomers call these giant, blue stars OB stars due to the predominantly blue wavelengths of light that they emit.

They are the rarest, hottest, shortest-living and largest stars in the entire galaxy.

"OB stars are rare, in a Galaxy of 400 billion stars there might be less than 200,000," study co-author Michelangelo Pantaleoni González, a researcher at the Spanish Astrobiology Center (CAB), told Live Science.

It's because of stars like these, dead long ago, that the geochemistry of our planet was complex enough for biochemistry to arise." Wherever we find blue stars, we find the most active and most "alive" regions of the galaxy, according to the researchers.

The researchers compiled their star map by triangulating the stars' distances to Earth using a technique called stellar parallax.

By comparing the apparent positions of the stars, observed from different perspectives during Earth's orbit around the sun, astronomers can calculate the distances to the stars themselves.