Star clusters tagged posts

Researchers provide the first plausible explanation to why one of the most massive black hole pairs observed to date by gravitational waves also seemed to merge on a non-circular orbit. Their suggested solution, now published in Nature, involves a chaotic triple drama inside a giant disk of gas around a super massive black hole in a galaxy far, far away.

Black holes are one of the most fascinating objects in the Universe, but our knowledge of them is still limited — especi...

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...

An image of the Wild Duck Cluster was captured by the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The blue stars at the center of the image are the stars of the cluster. Every star in the Wild Duck Cluster is roughly 250 million years old. Older, redder stars surround the cluster.
Credit: European Southern Observatory

Do star clusters harbor many generations of stars or just one? Scientists have long searched for an answer and, thanks to the University of Arizona’s MMT telescope, found one in the Wild Duck Cluster, where stars spin at different speeds, disguising their common age.

In a partnership between the UA and the Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute, a team of Korean and Belgian astronomers used UA instruments to solve a puzzle about flocks of stars call...

A snapshot of a simulated giant molecular cloud marked with with star clusters in formation. Credit: McMaster University

Clusters of stars across the vast reaches of time and space of the entire universe were all created the same way, researchers at McMaster University have determined. Researchers Corey Howard, Ralph Pudritz and William Harris used highly-sophisticated computer simulations to re-create what happens inside gigantic clouds of concentrated gases known to give rise to clusters of stars that are bound together by gravity.

The state-of-the-art simulations follow a cloud of interstellar gas 500 light years in diameter, projecting 5 million years’ worth of evolution wrought by turbulence, gravity and feedback from intense radiation pressure produced by massive stars within forming...