Latest Messier 80 Stories

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope offers this wonderful view of the crowded stellar encampment called Messier 68 which is a spherical, star-filled region of space known as a globular cluster. Globular clusters to hang together for many billions of years. This is because mutual gravitational attraction among a cluster’s hundreds of thousands or even millions of stars keeps stellar members in check. By looking at the light of...

For the first time, a team of astronomers has succeeded in investigating the earliest phases of the evolutionary history of our home Galaxy, the Milky Way. The scientists, from the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at Bonn University and the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, deduce that the early Galaxy went from smooth to clumpy in just a few hundred million years. The team publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.Led by Professor...

Around a quarter of the globular star clusters in our Milky Way galaxy are invaders from other galaxies, according to a team of scientists from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. In a paper accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Swinburne astronomer Professor Duncan Forbes has shown that many of our galaxy's globular star clusters are actually foreigners - having been born elsewhere and then migrated to our Milky Way. "It turns out that...

Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have uncovered two distinct kinds of "rejuvenated" stars in the globular cluster Messier 30. A new study shows that both stellar collisions and a process sometimes called vampirism are behind this cosmic "face lift". The scientists also uncover evidence that both sorts of blue stragglers were produced during a critical dynamical event (known as "core collapse") that occurred in Messier 30 a few billion years ago.Stars in globular clusters...