Latest Tucana constellation 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...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A team of astrophysicists from the Center for Astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame are exploring a discrepancy between the amount of lithium predicted by the standard models of elemental production during the Big Bang and the amount of lithium observed in the gas of the Small Magellanic Cloud. The Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy with a diameter of about 7,000 light-years.  It contains several hundred million...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new sky survey has revealed that our Milky Way galaxy may not be as special as scientists had previously thought. The Milky Way is a fairly common type of galaxy, but being paired up with neighbors like the Magellanic Clouds makes it stick out above the rest, so much so that astronomers thought it could be a one of a kind occurrence. However, astronomer Dr. Aaron Robotham burst everyone's bubble when searching for groups of...

The Magellanic Stream is an arc of hydrogen gas spanning more than 100 degrees of the sky as it trails behind the Milky Way's neighbor galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has long been thought to be the dominant gravitational force in forming the Stream by pulling gas from the Clouds. A new computer simulation by Gurtina Besla (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and her colleagues now shows, however, that the Magellanic Stream resulted...

A giant stream of gas flowing from neighbor galaxies around our own Milky Way is much longer and older than previously thought, astronomers have discovered. The new revelations provide a fresh insight on what started the gaseous intergalactic streamer.The astronomers used the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to fill important gaps in the picture of gas streaming outward from the Magellanic Clouds. The first evidence of such a flow, named the Magellanic...

Like a fork piercing a fried egg, a giant finger of hydrogen gas is poking through our Milky Way Galaxy from outside, astronomers using CSIRO radio telescopes at Parkes and Narrabri have found.The location of the intrusion may give a crucial clue to the fate of the little galaxies the gas flows from, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds."We're thrilled because we can determine exactly where this gas is ploughing into the Milky Way "“ it's usually extremely hard to get distances to such gas...

Cambridge, MA - The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are two of the Milky Way's closest neighboring galaxies. A stunning sight in the southern hemisphere, they were named after Ferdinand Magellan, who explored those waters in the 16th century. For hundreds of years, these galaxies were considered satellites of the Milky Way, gravitationally bound to our home galaxy. New research by Gurtina Besla (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and her colleagues...

Seattle, WA - The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are two of the Milky Way's closest neighboring galaxies. Both are visible only in the southern hemisphere. By studying their orbits, astronomers can learn about both the histories of the Clouds and the structure of the Milky Way (from its influence on the Clouds' motions). Astronomers Nitya Kallivayalil and Charles Alcock (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Roeland van der Marel (Space Telescope...

This new image taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope depicts bright, blue, newly formed stars that are blowing a cavity in the center of a star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud.At the heart of the star-forming region, lies star cluster NGC 602. The high-energy radiation blazing out from the hot young stars is sculpting the inner edge of the outer portions of the nebula, slowly eroding it away and eating into the material beyond. The diffuse outer reaches of the nebula prevent...

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...