Latest Star cluster Stories

The Seven Sisters, also known as the Pleiades, seem to float on a bed of feathers in a new infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Clouds of dust sweep around the stars, swaddling them in a cushiony veil. The view is quite different from what you might see if you look out to the west shortly after dusk. Right now, the famous family of stars is "stepping out" in the evening skies with a very bright and dazzling Venus. During the period from around April 10 to 13, the...

Venus Express, Europe's first mission to Venus, has now successfully orbited our closest neighbour 355 times during the past year. Coincidentally on its first anniversary on 11 April, Venus and the constellation Pleiades are very close in the sky, for your viewing pleasure.The celestial spectacle is clearly visible with the naked eye "“ provided that there are no clouds to cover it. Venus and Pleiades can be seen drawing closer together in the western sky; after sunset and before midnight....

Staring into the crowded, dusty core of two merging galaxies, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a region where star formation has gone wild.The interacting galaxies appear as a single, odd-looking galaxy called Arp 220. The galaxy is a nearby example of the aftermath of two colliding galaxies. In fact, Arp 220 is the brightest of the three galactic mergers closest to Earth. This latest view of the galaxy is yielding new insights into the early universe, when galactic wrecks were...

Corrects name in 12th paragraph to read "... Robert Lupton" ... instead of "... Robert Lufton." By Deborah Zabarenko WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Milky Way is warped -- like a bowl, a saddle or the brim of a fedora hat, depending on when you look -- and a pair of interloping galaxies may be to blame, astronomers said on Monday. Earth is in a fairly non-warped neighborhood, because it lies relatively close to the center of the Milky Way's disk, said Leo Blitz of the University of...

By Deborah ZabarenkoWASHINGTON -- The Milky Way is warped -- like a bowl, a saddle or the brim of a fedora hat, depending on when you look -- and a pair of interloping galaxies may be to blame, astronomers said on Monday.Earth is in a fairly non-warped neighborhood, because it lies relatively close to the center of the Milky Way's disk, said Leo Blitz of the University of California, Berkeley.But the far-flung reaches of the galaxy could be caught up in a warp of as much as 20,000...

NASA -- Call it the Bermuda Triangle of our Milky Way Galaxy: a tiny patch of sky that has been known for years to be the source of the mysterious blasts of X-rays and gamma rays. Now, a team of astronomers, led by Don Figer of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., has solved the mystery by identifying one of the most massive star clusters in the galaxy. The little-known cluster, which has not been catalogued, is about 20 times more massive than typical star...

ESO -- Just like Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol takes us on a journey into past, present and future in the time of only one Christmas Eve, two of ESO's telescopes captured various stages in the life of a star in a single image. ESO PR Photo 42a/05 shows the area surrounding the stellar cluster NGC 2467, located in the southern constellation of Puppis ("The Stern"). With an age of a few million years at most, it is a very active stellar nursery, where new stars are born...

JPL -- Astronomers have at last found inner light! Only, they didn't find it through the typical Earthly methods of meditation, exercise and therapy. Instead, the light was discovered inside our Milky Way galaxy after hours of deep self-reflection with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The astronomers, who are members of the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) team, used Spitzer's heat-seeking infrared eyes to gaze at the dust-drenched plane of our galaxy. When...

NASA -- This is a Hubble Space Telescope view of one of the most dynamic and intricately detailed star-forming regions in space, located 210,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. At the center of the region is a brilliant star cluster called NGC 346. A dramatic structure of arched, ragged filaments with a distinct ridge surrounds the cluster.A torrent of radiation from the cluster's hot stars eats into denser areas creating a fantasy...

NASA -- Like dust bunnies that lurk in corners and under beds, surprisingly complex loops and blobs of cosmic dust lie hidden in the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1316. This image made from data obtained with the NASA Hubble Space Telescope reveals the dust lanes and star clusters of this giant galaxy that give evidence that it was formed from a past merger of two gas-rich galaxies.The combination of Hubble's superb spatial resolution and the sensitivity of the Advanced Camera for Surveys...