Globular Clusters tagged posts

Hubble sees a swarm of ancient star clusters around lenticular galaxy NGC 5308, located just under 100 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows star clusters encircling a galaxy, like bees buzzing around a hive: lenticular galaxy NGC 5308, just under 100 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear). Members of a galaxy type that lies between an elliptical and a spiral galaxy, lenticular galaxies such as NGC 5308 are disk galaxies that have used up, or lost, the majority of their gas and dust. As a result, they experience very little ongoing star formation and consist mainly of old and aging stars.

On Oct...

This is a portrait of the massive globular cluster NGC 1783 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. This dense swarm of stars is located about 160,000 light years from Earth and has the mass of about 170,000 Suns. A new study by astronomers from the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University (KIAA), the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), Northwestern University and the Adler Planetarium suggests the globular cluster swept up stray gas and dust from outside the cluster to give birth to three different generations of stars. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA. Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt (geckzilla.com)

Astronomers have for the 1st time found old globular clusters with young populations of stars that d...

The Milky Way arcs into a panorama in the southern sky, taken from the Paranal Observatory, Chile. Credit: ESO/H.H. Heyer

When our galaxy was born, ~13B yrs ago, a plethora of clusters containing millions of stars emerged. But over time, they have been disappearing. However, hidden behind younger stars that were formed later, some old and dying star clusters remain, eg E 3. European astronomers have now studied this testimony to the beginnings of our galaxy.

Globular clusters are spherical-shaped or globular stellar groupings which can contain millions of stars. There are about 200 of them in the Milky Way, but few are as intriguing to astronomers as the E 3 cluster. It is 30,000 light years away, in the southern constellation of Chameleon...