Category Astronomy/Space

This colorful view of the globular star cluster NGC 6362 was captured by the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-m telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. Credit: ESO

Globular clusters have for a long time been considered as formed of stars with similar initial chemical composition, but recently, increasing evidence has emerged regarding their more complex nature. NGC 6362 lies 25,000 light years away in the constellation Ara. It is ~13.5 billion years old and at a mass of ~50,000 solar masses, it is the least massive globular cluster with multiple detected photometric stellar populations that have different chemical abundances.

To determine the chemical composition of NGC 6362, the team used the Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph (FLAMES) mounted on one of ...

The plane of our Galaxy as seen in infrared light from the WISE satellite. The bulge is a distinct component and most of its mass resides in a boxy/peanut bulge, which is in cylindrical rotation. An ancient population, estimated to be 1% of the mass of the bulge, has been detected kinematically detected in the inner Milky Way and does not cylindrically. Instead, this population is likely to have been one of the first parts of the Milky Way to form. Credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF/AIP/A. Kunder

An international team has discovered that the central 2000 light years within the Milky Way Galaxy hosts an ancient population of stars >10 billion years old and their orbits in space preserve the early history of the formation of the Milky Way...

Illustration of how light is transformed into ALP by the galaxy. Credit: Credits to Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University (for the active galaxy core) and to NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring (for image of earth).

Researchers at Stockholm University are getting closer to corner light dark-matter particle models. Observations can rule out some axion-like particles in the quest for the content of dark matter.

Physicists are still struggling with the conundrum of identifying more than 80% of the matter in the Universe. One possibility is that it is made up by extremely light particles which weigh less than a billionth of the mass of the electron. These particles are often called axion-like particles (ALPs)...

Herschel’s view of the Eagle Nebula. Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project Herschel’s view of the Galactic Plane. Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project

ESA’s Herschel mission releases today a series of unprecedented maps of star-forming hubs in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. This is accompanied by a set of catalogues of hundreds of thousands of compact sources that span all phases leading to the birth of stars in our Galaxy. These maps and catalogues will be valuable resources for astronomers for planning follow-up studies of particularly interesting regions in the Galactic Plane.

Herschel’s view of the Eagle Nebula. Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project

During its 4 years of operations (2009-2013), the Herschel space observatory scanned the sky at far-inf...