Latest Globular cluster Stories
Millions of clustered stars glisten like an iridescent opal in a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Called Omega Centauri, this sparkling orb of stars is like a miniature galaxy. It is the biggest and brightest of the more than 150 similar objects, called globular clusters, that orbit around the outside of our Milky Way galaxy. Stargazers at southern latitudes can spot the stellar gem with the naked eye in the constellation Centaurus. Spitzer's new infrared view, which has been...
If the latest simulation of what happens when black holes merge is correct, there could be hundreds of rogue black holes, each weighing several thousand times the mass of the sun, roaming around the Milky Way galaxy. "Rogue black holes like this would be very difficult to spot," says Vanderbilt astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, who is presenting the results of the supercomputer simulation at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Jan. 9 in Austin, Texas. Much of the research was...
XMM-Newton has given astronomers and physics a valuable new insight into the most exotic stars in the Universe. Known as neutron stars, the composition of these extremely dense stellar objects has always been something of a puzzle. Now, XMM-Newton has revealed that they almost certainly resemble over-sized atomic nuclei.Natalie Webb and Didier Barret, Centre d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements, Toulouse, France, have used XMM-Newton's EPIC camera to find three previously undiscovered neutron...
AUSTIN, Texas — Brilliant blue blobs weighing tens of thousands of solar masses have been found lurking in the seemingly barren expanse of intergalactic space. The "eyes" of the Hubble Space Telescope resolved the objects, which appear to be clusters of stars born in the swirls and eddies of a galactic smashup some 200 million years ago. The mysterious star clusters are considered orphaned, as they don't belong to any particular galaxy. Instead, they are clumped...
Finding blue blobs in space sounds like an encounter with an alien out of a science fiction movie. But the Hubble Space Telescope's powerful vision has resolved strange objects nicknamed "blobs" and found them to be brilliant blue clusters of stars born in the swirls and eddies of a galactic smashup 200 million years ago.The findings are being reported by Duilia de Mello of the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md....
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is providing strong evidence that white dwarfs, the burned out relics of stars, are given a "kick" when they form.The sharp vision of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys uncovered the speedy white dwarfs in the ancient globular star cluster NGC 6397, a dense swarm of hundreds of thousands of stars.Before the stars burned-out as white dwarfs, they were among the most massive stars in NGC 6397. Because massive stars are thought to gather at a globular...
New Globular Cluster Found in Milky WayImages made with ESO's New Technology Telescope at La Silla by a team of German astronomers reveal a rich circular cluster of stars in the inner parts of our Galaxy. Located 30,000 light-years away, this previously unknown closely-packed group of about 100,000 stars is most likely a new globular cluster. Star clusters provide us with unique laboratory conditions to investigate various aspects of astrophysics. They represent groups of stars with similar...
SEATTLE, WA -- Astronomers have discovered the most distant population of star clusters ever seen, hidden behind one of the nearest such clusters to Earth. At a distance of more than a billion light-years, the newly discovered star clusters provide a unique probe of what similar systems in our own galaxy once looked like. "Given their distance, the light that we see today from these clusters was emitted more than one billion years ago and may hold important clues for understanding the...
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found that young stellar nurseries, called open star clusters, have very short lives. Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys gleaned these new observations during a "Where's Waldo" search for blue stars tossed out of their open cluster "nest" in the nearby galaxy known as NGC 1313. Only Hubble has the resolution needed to distinguish individual stars in galaxies at NGC 1313's distance "” about 14 million light-years....
Astronomers have found a black hole where few thought they could ever exist, inside a globular star cluster. The finding has broad implications for the dynamics of stars clusters and also for the existence of a still-speculative new class of black holes called 'intermediate-mass' black holes. The discovery is reported in the current issue of Nature. Tom Maccarone of the University of Southampton in England leads an international team on the finding, made primarily with the European Space...
Latest Globular cluster Reference Libraries
Star Cluster -- Star clusters are physically bound systems of stars. In order of low compactness to high compactness (and in some sense also age) they range from stellar associations to open clusters to globular clusters. Star clusters are held together by the gravitation of their members. Due to both external (encounters with massive objects, influence of the host galaxy) and internal (encounters with other cluster members, stellar evolution) influences, clusters slowly evaporate. Their...
Globular Cluster -- A globular cluster is a cluster of stars that is spherical in shape and extremely dense towards its core. Globular clusters are usually composed of hundreds of thousands of old stars, similar to the bulge of a spiral galaxy but confined to a volume of only a few cubic parsecs. Some globular clusters (like Omega Centauri in our Milky Way, and G1 in M31) are truly massive clusters, with several million times the mass of our Sun. Such globular clusters may be the...
Galaxy -- Stars are almost always found in collections called galaxies, together with gas, dust, and large amounts of dark matter detected by its gravitational effects. These are all held together by gravitational attraction and orbit a common centre. There is some evidence that black holes may exist at the centre of some or most galaxies. Galaxies come in three main types: ellipticals, spirals, and irregulars. A slightly more extensive description of galaxy types is given by the Hubble...
Virgo A Galaxy -- Discovered 1781 by Charles Messier. The giant elliptical galaxy M87, also called Virgo A, is one of the most remarkable objects in the sky. It is perhaps the dominant galaxy in the closest big cluster to us, the famous Virgo Cluster of galaxies (sometimes also called "Coma-Virgo cluster" which is more acurate, as it extends into constellation Coma), and lies at the distance of this cluster (about 60 million light-years). M87 lies well in the heart of the Virgo cluster...
Milky Way Galaxy -- The Milky Way (a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn derived from the Greek Galaxia (gala, galactos means "milk")) is a hazy band of white light across the night sky formed by billions of stars in the disc of our galaxy. The Milky Way appears brightest in the direction of Sagittarius, where the galactic centre lies. Relative to the celestial equator, the Milky Way passes as far north as the constellation of Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of...
