Young stars floating together in isolated gangs, nowhere near adults and asking for trouble. It sounds like the perfect setup for a teen slasher flick, but it’s really a cosmic mystery just discovered 12 million light-years from Earth.

Diulia de Mello, of the Catholic University of America and the Goddard Space Flight Center, and colleagues spotted the stragglers near a smashup of three galaxies (including the well-known pair M81 and M82, right). De Mello calls them “blue blobs”. They are “weird,” she adds – “in regions they are not supposed to be.” That’s because they appear relatively far away from the galaxies, where gas and dust – ingredients generally needed to make stars — are sparse.

It turns out that the blobs are actually clusters of young stars, born as the galaxies collided with each other over the past 200 million years. The cosmic disruption led to spots locally richer in gas, which then condensed under its own gravity to form newborn stars.

Eventually, the young hoodlums could grow up to throw their own trash into space – by exploding at the ends of their lives and spewing their chemical elements back into intergalactic space. It seems they may never be up to any good.

More details and images are available here.