Category Astronomy/Space

Finding lost star siblings. Star clusters have been part of the Imaginarium of human civilization for millennia. The brightest star clusters to Earth, like the Pleiades, are readily visible to the naked eye. A team has now revealed the existence of massive stellar halos, termed coronae, surrounding local star clusters.

“Clusters form big families of stars that can stay together for large parts of their lifetime...

In 2015, the New Horizons space probe discovered spectacular snowcapped mountains on Pluto, which are strikingly similar to mountains on Earth. Such a landscape had never before been observed elsewhere in the Solar System. However, as atmospheric temperatures on our planet decrease at altitude, on Pluto they heat up at altitude as a result of solar radiation.

So where does this ice come from? An international team led by CNRS scientists* conducted this exploration...

Astronomers have found that the total number of globular clusters around Dragonfly 44 and, therefore, the dark matter content, is much less than earlier findings had suggested, which shows that this galaxy is neither unique nor anomalous.

At present, the formation of galaxies is difficult to understand without the presence of a ubiquitous, but mysterious component, termed dark matter. Astronomers have measure how much dark matter there is around galaxies, and have found that it varies between 10 and 300 times the quantity of visible matter...

NASA’s extensive fleet of spacecraft allows scientists to study the Sun extremely close-up — one of the agency’s spacecraft is even on its way to fly through the Sun’s outer atmosphere. But sometimes taking a step back can provide new insight.

In a new study, scientists looked at sunspots ...