Latest Star clusters Stories
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...
Imagine trying to understand how a football game works based on just a few fuzzy snapshots of the game in play. Astronomers have faced this challenge when it comes to understanding the dynamics of the beehive swarm of stars in the globular star clusters that orbit our Milky Way Galaxy. Now, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the best observational evidence to date that globular clusters sort out stars according to their mass, governed by a gravitational billiard ball...
A new Hubble image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. As the two galaxies smash together, thousand of millions of stars are born, mostly in groups and clusters of stars. The Universe is an all-action arena for some of the largest, most slowly evolving and surprising processes known to mankind. A new picture taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the best ever view of the Antennae...
VLT Presents Evidence for Mass Transfer as Origin of some Blue Straggler Stars Astronomers have found possible proofs of stellar vampirism in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, they found that some hot, bright, and apparently young stars in the cluster present less carbon and oxygen than the majority of their sisters. This indicates that these few stars likely formed by taking their material from another star. "This is the first detection of a chemical...
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered what astronomers are reporting as the dimmest stars ever seen in any globular star cluster. Globular clusters are spherical concentrations of hundreds of thousands of stars.These clusters formed early in the 13.7-billion-year-old universe. The cluster NGC 6397 is one of the closest globular star clusters to Earth. Seeing the whole range of stars in this area will yield insights into the age, origin, and evolution of the cluster.Although astronomers...
A long, slender stream of ancient stars has been discovered racing across the northern sky. The stream is about 30,000 light-years distant from Earth and is flowing high over the Milky Way Galaxy at some 230 kilometers per second, or more than half a million miles per hour. The discovery was made by Dr. Carl Grillmair, of the Spitzer Science Center in Pasadena, Calif. and his colleague Odysseas Dionatos from the Astronomical Observatory of Rome. Grillmair presented his findings at the...
A study of the Universe's most massive galaxy clusters has shown that mergers play a vital role in their evolution. Astronomers at Oxford University and the Gemini Observatory used a combination of data from the twin Gemini Telescopes, located in Hawaii and Chile, and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to study populations of stars in the Universe's most massive galaxy clusters over a range of epochs "“ the earliest being half the age of the Universe. The HST images were used to map...
Latest Star clusters 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...
Open Cluster -- An open cluster is a group of star formed from a molecular cloud, the illuminated parts of which we see as one or more nebulae. They are also called galactic clusters since they exist within the galaxy. All the stars in an open cluster have more or less the same age and the same chemical composition, so any difference between them is solely due to their mass. Most open clusters are dominated by their O-type and B-type giant blue stars, which are very luminous but...
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...
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...
![NASA\](/media/gallery/hubble-space-telescope/thumbs/thumbs_nasashubble.jpg "NASA\")
