This demonstrates how many of this galaxy's globular clusters were acquired in the past. Related Stories. The finding, using modern instruments, confirms one of the oldest observations Messier 11 is also known as the Wild Duck Cluster, as its It is a globular cluster: a spherical collection of stars bound together by gravity. Clusters like this orbit around galaxies and typically reside in In a new paper, astrophysicists show that distinguishing features of Palomar 5 are likely the result of an oversized black hole population of more than of them The finding opens up a new window to search for exoplanets at greater distances Did Venus Ever Have Oceans?
Now an international These rocky worlds have an ultra-thin outer brittle layer and little to no topography.
Such worlds However, the gas and dust that surrounds them absorbs much of the visible light they emit. Infrared observations are the most reliable way to observe embedded clusters. Astronomers think most stars are born in embedded clusters, and open clusters are their later stage once star formation has run its course. However, not every embedded cluster survives to become an open cluster; they are often disrupted before the process is finished.
Embedded clusters are laboratories for studying newborn and very young stars. They provide the environment in which planets form, and dictate how much mass ends up in each star. Support Our Science. Utility Menu News Events. Share this Page. Facebook Share on Facebook.
Twitter Share on Twitter. Share on LinkedIn. Share via Email. A Middleweight Black Hole is Hiding at the Center of a Giant Star Cluster Studying the populations of globular clusters to help understand galaxy formation and evolution. The Distribution of Globular Clusters Modeling the dynamics of globular clusters to determine if they could harbor habitable planets. Big Questions. See All Staff. Brown and S. Casertano STScI.
Related News. Harvard and Smithsonian are both full institutional members of the latest epoch of the survey, SDSS-V, which started observations in Telescopes and Instruments. Astronomers use this telescope to observe objects in the Solar System and the Milky Way, as well as other galaxies, including the supermassive black holes known as quasars. Astronomers also use the 1. Roughly spherical in shape, they contain hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of stars.
Studying them helps astronomers estimate the age of the universe or figure out where the center of a galaxy lies. Most are estimated to be at least 10 billion years old, and contain some of the oldest stars in the galaxy. The clusters likely formed very early, before the galaxy flattened into a spiral disc.
Some globular clusters, such as Messier 13 M13 in the constellation Hercules , can be seen with the naked eye. They are pretty to look at, but it was only after telescopes were invented that they began to shine in astronomy circles. With telescopes, it was possible to peer closer at the stars within these clusters. They are mostly low-mass red stars and intermediate-mass yellow stars — none of them more massive than 0. Some other general observations of globular clusters, according to Pennsylvania State University : they are found in every direction in the sky, the density of stars in a globular cluster is much greater than the density of stars around the sun, and the clusters are not found to contain any gas.
The abundance of any elements heavier than helium is only 1 percent to 10 percent of the abundance of the same elements in the sun. Globular clusters formed from giant molecular clouds, or huge masses of gas that form stars as they collapse. Because there is less free gas available now than at the beginning of the universe, globular clusters generally cannot form today.
However, there is a globular cluster forming in a galaxy near to the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud. This is because it has an unusual amount of gas, Harvey Richer, an astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told Space. While you can see multiple generations of stars in globular clusters, what happens is the subsequent generations evolve from the first one.
The first set of stars gobble up most of the gas, then as they die millions of years later they eject the gas. This means that the age difference between different star cluster generations is small, less than 1 percent of the globular cluster's age, Richer added.
The younger stars have heavier elements and more helium than their older companions, and also have different motions than the older stars. Recent research with the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that the original population is more centered in the globular cluster, while newer stars slowly diffuse outward.
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