ESA Gaia spacecraft tagged posts

Star Clusters are only the Tip of the Iceberg

Alpha Persei star cluster
A panoramic view of the nearby Alpha Persei star cluster and its corona. The member stars in the corona are invisible. These are only revealed thanks to the combination of precise measurements with the ESA Gaia satellite and innovative machine learning tools (© Stefan Meingast, made with Gaia Sky)

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...

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