Latest Star clusters Stories

[Watch the Video: A close look at the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Using their Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have managed to capture a new infrared image of 47 Tucanae, the second most massive globular cluster in the galaxy. The picture, which was released by the ESO on Thursday, depicts the cluster “in striking detail,” the...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Just as your lifestyle can cause you to show your age, the same is true for star clusters, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found that some globular clusters are still young at heart, despite being relics of the early Universe. Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars that are held tightly together by their mutual gravitational attraction. “Although...

[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] European Southern Observatory Photo Release This colorful view of the globular star cluster NGC 6362 was captured by the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. This new picture, along with a new image of the central region from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, provide the best view of this little-known cluster ever obtained. Globular clusters are mainly composed of tens of thousands of very...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A surprising black hole discovery made while using the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) is causing scientists to change what they know of globular star clusters. Astronomers used VLA to study the globular cluster known as Messier 22, which is a tight-knit collection of hundreds of thousands of stars that lie 10,000 light-years away from Earth. The team had hoped to find evidence for a rare type of...

[ Video 1 ] | Video 2 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Juan Ponce de León set sail to the Americas to try and find the fountain of youth, but maybe if he had a better telescope he could have just looked up to find it. The European Space Observatory (ESO) released a new image taken by La Silla Observatory in Chile that shows the globular star cluster Messier 4, and one particular star that seems like it belongs in California. The cluster contains tens of...

A loose star cluster located approximately 800 to 1,000 light years from Earth, detected by scientists more than 180 years ago but never analyzed in detail, could be vital in helping experts not only to understand how stars like the Sun evolve, but also to help them in the search for Earth-like planets. According to a June 22 press release, researchers from Penn State University and colleagues from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC); Yale University; and the California...

Researchers working at the University of Bonn in Germany have used computer simulations to discover the first evidence that the way in which stars form depends upon the conditions of their birth environments, claims a new study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In a Friday statement, the Society said that the properties of stars, which are believed to form in interstellar space from gas and dust clouds, are dependent upon the surrounding conditions...

Astronomers have found a cluster of stars that they say survived a massacre 13 billion years ago. The team used computer simulations to look at how the compact groups of stars surrounding our Milky Way galaxy were formed. There are about 200 compact groups sitting close to our galaxy, each containing up to a million stars. The researchers ran simulations of isolated and colliding galaxies, in which they included a model for formation and destruction of stellar clusters. Once a...

Astronomers discover how mysterious stars stay so young Mysterious “blue stragglers” are old stars that appear younger than they should be: they burn hot and blue. Several theories have attempted to explain why they don’t show their age, but, until now, scientists have lacked the crucial observations with which to test each hypothesis. Armed with such observational data, two astronomers from Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison report that a mechanism...

Sees right through the heart of the Milky Way [ Watch Video 1 ] | [ Watch Video 2 ] Two newly discovered globular clusters have been added to the total of just 158 known globular clusters in our Milky Way. They were found in new images from ESO’s VISTA survey telescope as part of the Via Lactea (VVV) survey. This survey has also turned up the first star cluster that is far beyond the center of the Milky Way and whose light has had to travel right through the dust and gas in the heart...