While the young are often hotheaded, a handful of juvenile stars in a nearby stellar nursery have broken the temperature gauges, almost literally.

The heat is in some cases more than double what researchers expected -- so hot that technicians had to position blinders on the electronic camera aboard the Chandra X-ray Observatory that recorded the X-ray emissions.

The stars -- some massive and some not so big -- are in a cluster of young stars in the Orion Nebula. Some of them soared above 108 million degrees Fahrenheit (60 million degrees Celsius). The hottest massive star known before had been around 45 million degrees Fahrenheit (25 million degrees Celsius), according to the researchers involved with the finding.

"The big surprise is clearly that in the case of the Orion core [region], these high temperatures are more the norm than the exception," said Norbert Schulz of the Chandra X-ray Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Schulz said the findings do not call any stellar evolution models into question. But along with the recent discovery of a huge star much like our Sun, ideas about how stars form and evolve are changing rapidly.

"We have to realize that there is more variety out there," Schulz told SPACE.com. "Clearly there is no single process or model to describe the mechanisms of X-ray production in massive stars."

Schulz and his colleagues studied a popular cluster of stars, known as the Orion Trapezium Cluster, within the Orion Nebula. The median age of stars in the cluster is 300,000 years. Our Sun, by comparison, is about 5 billion years old.

An older star creates high temperatures in its atmosphere, called the corona, because of strong magnetic fields that twist and interact with gases. The new study indicates that this same process might be the source of heat in some of the oldest stars in the Orion Nebula, which are still young by comparison to our Sun, said Joel Kastner of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

"But the X-ray temperatures measured by Chandra for the young stars in Orion are hard to explain in this way," Kastner said.

So researchers are left to find another explanation for why the youngest stars are so hot.

Kastner told SPACE.com that these young stars may be interacting with a surrounding disk of gas and dust similar to the one that developed into the planets of our solar system. Scientists call this a protoplanetary disk.

"Theorists have predicted these sorts of interactions, for stars that are still in the process of formation," Kastner said. "But we need a lot more information in order to have much confidence in that assertion."

Schulz offered what he called a long-shot possibility for why low-mass young stars might be so hot:

"It is quite mysterious, and my best shot here would be that some of these could be protostars in their contraction phase, where they still gain rotational speed, like an ice skater doing a pirouette," Schulz said. "Since they are probably also magnetic they constantly release energy through interaction with the magnetic field."

The five main young and massive Trapezium stars are responsible for the illumination of the entire Orion Nebula -- a giant cloud of gas and dust. These stars are 15 to 30 times more massive than our Sun. X-rays from such stars are thought to be produced by shocks that occur when high-velocity stellar winds ram into slower dense material.

The Chandra spectra show a temperatures of about 9 million to 18 million degrees Fahrenheit (5 million to 10 million degrees Celsius) on some of the Orion stars, which is consistent with this model. However, four of these five stars also show additional components between 54 million and 108 million degrees Fahrenheit (30 million and 60 million degrees Celsius).

"The fact that some of these massive stars show such a hot component and some not, and that a hot component seems to be more common than previously assumed, is an important new aspect in the spectral behavior of these stars," said David Huenemoerder, research physicist at the MIT Center for Space Research.