Rogue black holes might fill our galaxy Jan 10, 2008
"We realized that basically any black hole merger would kick the new remnant out of a globular cluster, because the escape velocity is less than 100 kilometers per second." ... Their existence is controversial, but they are thought to inhabit globular clusters, or crowds of 100,000 to a million ancient by gravity ... Results showed that even if every globular cluster in our galaxy started out with an intermediate-sized black hole, only 30 percent of these would hold onto them. (MSNBC -- Technology)
How White Dwarf Stars Get Their 'Kicks' Dec 5, 2007
Globular clusters are dense swarms of hundreds of thousands of stars ... Richer explains that globular clusters sort out stars according to their mass, governed by a gravitational billiard-ball game among stars ... The image at left shows the dense swarm of hundreds of thousands of stars that make up the globular cluster. (Science Daily)
Dead stars propelled like rockets Dec 5, 2007
Young white dwarfs were found far away from the center of the globular cluster, where they were expected to be found ... Astronomers used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to look at the distribution of white dwarfs in the ancient globular cluster , a dense swarm of hundreds of thousands of stars ... Through Hubble's images, however, they discovered young residing at the edge of the globular cluster. (MSNBC -- Technology)
Amateur astronomers eye the night sky Nov 8, 2007
com - The Union Democrat Online. Published: November 7, 2007. (The Union Democrat)
Planetary Conjunctions for 2008 Oct 4, 2007
As a bonus, Mecury will be a mere 15 arcminutes from the globular cluster M75. Use binoculars to catch Jupiter, Mercury, and the magnitude 8. (Suite101.com)
Palomar Scope Sees Sharpest Sep 19, 2007
contains 60 arcminutes, or 60', and each arcminute contains 60 arcseconds, or 60".) These LuckyCam images of the Cat's Eye Nebula (top) and the core of globular cluster M13 (bottom) demonstrate the power of adaptive optics on a large telescope, in this case the Hale 200-inch (5-meter) reflector atop Palomar Mountain. The Cat's Eye and M13 images are 20 and 10 arcseconds wide, respectively. Nick Law (Caltech) / Craig Mackay (Univ. of Cambridge) As has been done at most other professional... (SkyAndTelescope.com)
Boffins unveil sharpest ever stellar snaps Sep 5, 2007
The technology has sharpened up views of singles stars too, but the newly released pictures of the Cat's Eye nebula and the M13 globular cluster (above) are quite possibly the most stunning images produced yet. In the M13 globular cluster, the stars are crammed together as little as one light day apart. (Register)
'Clearest' images taken of space Sep 4, 2007
The Globular cluster M13 as imaged conventionally by the Palomar 200in telescope (l) and with the Lucky camera (r) The inventor of the system, Dr Craig Mackay of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, says it is rather like looking at an object through a heat haze. "The object is distorted by the haze most of the time," he explained, "but every now and again there are moments when the haze drops and you can see it very clearly.". (BBC News -- Science)
Google Sky puts on a great show Aug 24, 2007
Some nebulae are listed as globular clusters, for example ... A search for the giant globular cluster Omega Centauri, for example, showcases nicely the software's ability to zoom in, with an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope eventually popping up. (Nature News Service)
Google Earth gazes into deep space Aug 23, 2007
Clicking on a red dot within the constellation Sagittarius, for example, leads to information on Globular Cluster M55, aka Messier 55, a cluster within the constellation that was "discovered by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1761 and catalogued by Charles Messier in 1778," according to its write-up, which includes links to the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database and Simbad, an astronomical database maintained by several leading national and international space agencies. As with Earth mode, Sky offers... (USA Today -- Tech)
Hercules to appear in the sky Jul 28, 2007
It is a celebrated object; the brightest and most dramatic example of a globular cluster north of the celestial equator, often referred simply as "The Great Hercules Cluster." It's a concentration of over 100,000 stars, located at a distance of roughly 23,000 light years from us. Globular clusters are masses of stars that typically lie on the outskirts of our galaxy. (MSNBC -- Technology)
Observing Delphinus Jul 12, 2007
The brightest of these is a globular cluster found about 4 degrees out from the tail ... Another globular cluster, NGC 7006, can be found off the nose of the dophin if you draw a line from the back through the nose and extend it three and a half degrees. (Suite101.com)
Astronomical Clustering of Stars Jul 12, 2007
Stars cluster together in groups ranging from binary star systems to galactic and globular clusters of stars and at larger scales galaxies and clusters of galaxies ... Globular clusters typically contain a few hundred thousand stars that are so densely packed together that a small only a few near the outskirts ... The central portions of globular clusters blend into a fuzzy white haze. (Suite101.com)
Observing Libra May 5, 2007
It is NGC 5897, a globular cluster shining at magnitude 8 ... This globular cluster is a bit more diffuse than the well-known globulars and more irregularly shaped. (Suite101.com)
Hubble's Globular Cluster Discovery May 4, 2007
The European Space Agency said the telescope, observing globular cluster NGC 2808, has shown three separate generations of stars formed early in the cluster's life. Of the approximately 150 known globular clusters in our galaxy, NGC 2808 is one of the largest, containing more than 1 million stars held together by gravity. (SkyAndTelescope.com)
Hubble Finds Multiple Stellar 'Baby Booms' In A Globular Cluster May 3, 2007
Analysis of Hubble observations of the massive globular cluster NGC 2808 provides evidence that it has three generations of stars that formed early in the cluster s life ... This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of a dense swarm of stars shows the central region of the globular cluster NGC 2808 ... New observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have overturned conventional ideas about the early life of some massive globular clusters, showing that they can go through several periods... (Science Daily)
Observing Canes Venatici Apr 20, 2007
An unremarkable constellation holds surprise delights, including bright galaxies and one of the best globular clusters in the sky ... Thirteen degrees east of Cor Caroli lies M3, one of the most beautiful globular clusters in the sky ... A globular cluster is a spherical collection of old stars that orbits the Milky Way Galaxy (or any galaxy) in its halo, or periphery. (Suite101.com)
Best Objects for Binoculars Apr 9, 2007
Star Clusters -- There are a few globular clusters that make great binocular targets. Start with the best globular in the Northern Hemisphere, the Great Globular Cluster of Hercules, M13. (Suite101.com)
Wealth Of New Results From AKARI Infrared Sky-surveyor Mar 31, 2007
Stars at a later stage of their life have also been observed by AKARI's IRC instrument in the globular cluster NGC 104, situated in our Galaxy about 15 000 light years away from us. The stars that populate this cluster thought to have formed around the time of the creation of our Galaxy itself - are similar to what our Sun will become in about 6 thousand million years from now. (Science Daily)
Read More... Mar 28, 2007
5 magnitude near the globular cluster M70, just outside Sagittarius' bow, near the Archer's heart. It was a comet, 25 miles wide, a titanic piece of ice plunging through space at up to 90,000 mph. (Disinformation)
New family of stars found in Milky Way Mar 20, 2007
The discovery was part of a large-scale search for globular clusters in the Galactic Plane a slice of space in which the star-rich disk of our lies ... "It has been estimated that the region close to the Galactic Center might contain about 10 so-far unknown globular clusters, and we have started a large campaign to unveil and characterize them," said study team member Helmut Meusinger of the Thringer Landessternwarte, an observatory in Germany ... Combing through the new images, the... (MSNBC -- Technology)
Star Family Seen Through Dusty Fog Mar 15, 2007
Located 30,000 light-years away, this previously unknown closely-packed group of about 100,000 stars is most likely a new globular cluster. Colour-composite image of the newly discovered globular cluster candidate FSR 1735 in the inner parts of the Milky Way ... Globular clusters, in particular, are fossils in the Milky Way that provide useful information. (Science Daily)
Astronomers Detect Black Hole In Tiny 'Dwarf' Galaxy Jan 9, 2007
They were studying the nuclei of dwarf galaxies, which are thought to develop from globular clusters, tightly packed spherical collections of stars that orbit a galaxy. As they examined the properties of the nuclei, they discovered one galaxy, VCC128, that had a double nucleus. (Science Daily)
Black hole found in ancient lair Jan 6, 2007
A black hole has been found inside a compact group of ancient stars known as a globular cluster ... The international team says its work provides the first convincing evidence that some black holes might not only survive but grow and flourish in globular clusters ... "We were preparing for a long, systematic search of thousands of globular clusters with the hope of finding just one black hole," said Dr Maccarone. (BBC News -- Science)
An unexpected find: Black hole among cluster of stars Jan 6, 2007
About 10 times more massive than our Sun, the black hole was found inside a globular cluster in the elliptical galaxy NGC 4472, located some 50 million light-years away from Earth in the Virgo Cluster, reports Space ... Scientists think the ejection process works like this: because black holes are usually among the most massive objects in a globular cluster, they sink to the cluster's centre. (India Times, India -- Health/Science)
Scientists Spot Black Hole in Unlikely Place Jan 4, 2007
About 10 times more massive than our Sun, the black hole was found inside a globular cluster in the elliptical galaxy , located some 50 million light-years away from Earth in the Virgo Cluster. A black hole is an object whose mass is so concentrated that nothing, not even light, can escape the strong pull of its gravity from within a certain distance. (FOX News)
Top Stories of the Year from NASA Jan 1, 2007
During 2006, the Hubble continued to make unprecedented observations that included an image of the dimmest stars ever seen in any globular cluster and the discovery of 16 extrasolar planet candidates. For more information, visit. (BBSNews)
Sky Highlights of 2007 Dec 30, 2006
4 as it slips past the globular cluster M107 in Ophiuchus. As luck would have it, all the major meteor showers reach their peaks in 2007 with the Moon out of the sky. (SkyAndTelescope.com)
With Computers, Astronomers Show Predicted Present Day Distribution Of Elusive First Stars Dec 22, 2006
(January 10, 2003) -- New research, funded by NASA and the University of Tokyo, has shown astronomers may not yet have uncovered the mystery at the heart of one of the Galaxy's oldest star systems, the globular cluster ... Two distinct types of star cluster can be distinguished: globular clusters are tight groups of hundreds of thousands of very old. (Science Daily)
Christmas tree lights up city Green Dec 1, 2006
The red, orange, blue and green bulbs created a globular cluster of festival color. The lights are powered by four independent power units and the bulbs are wired so that a single bum bulb won t black out the tree. (New Haven Register, CT)
Comet SWAN Brightens Up! Nov 2, 2006
The comet's head was much brighter than the globular cluster M13 nearby. In my 12. (SkyAndTelescope.com)
Scientists Crack Open Stellar Evolution Nov 1, 2006
(October 4, 2006) -- Astronomers have found possible proofs of stellar vampirism in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae ... (January 10, 2003) -- New research, funded by NASA and the University of Tokyo, has shown astronomers may not yet have uncovered the mystery at the heart of one of the Galaxy's oldest star systems, the globular cluster ... Two distinct types of star cluster can be distinguished: globular clusters are tight groups of hundreds of thousands of very old. (Science Daily)
Mass migration: How stars move in crowd Oct 31, 2006
The stellar residents of the jam-packed celestial cities known as globular clusters employ a traffic system that causes lightweight stars to zoom to the city edges while keeping giants centrally located, astronomers have concluded ... A globular cluster is a dense collection of 10,000 to more than a million stars in a region spanning just 10 to 30 light-years. (MSNBC -- Technology)
How stars move in a mob Oct 31, 2006
By Jeanna Bryner, SPACE.com The stellar residents of the jam-packed celestial cities known as globular clusters employ a traffic system that causes lightweight stars to zoom to the city edges while keeping giants centrally located, astronomers have concluded. The study, detailed in the September issue of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, gives the first direct evidence of such sorting, called "mass segregation," a process long suspected to occur in globular clusters but never observed... (USA Today -- Tech)
Hubble Yields Direct Proof Of Stellar Sorting In A Globular Cluster Oct 26, 2006
A seven year study with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the best observational evidence yet that globular clusters sort out stars according to their mass, governed by a gravitational billiard ball game between stars ... It is one of the densest globular clusters in the Southern hemisphere ... The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has provided the best observational evidence to date that globular clusters sort stars according to their mass, governed by a... (Science Daily)
> read more Oct 6, 2006
The success of the project (named SWEEPS, the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search), stands in contrast to the zero transiting planets found by a similar Hubble survey of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae in 1999. The globular's lack of planets is probably due to its dearth of heavy elements. (SkyAndTelescope.com)
Origin of 'blue straggler' stars pinned down Oct 6, 2006
ESOThe globular cluster NGC 6397 is about 7,200 light-years in the southern constellation Ara ... Any stars that coalesced in a globular cluster should be the same age and similar in appearance, according to conventional thinking ... "Our discovery is ... a fundamental step toward the solution of the long-standing mystery of blue straggler formation in globular clusters," said Bologna University astronomer Francesco Ferraro, lead author of the paper. (MSNBC -- Technology)
Stellar Vampires Unmasked Oct 5, 2006
Astronomers have found possible proofs of stellar vampirism in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae ... Oxygen abundance as a function of carbon abundance (both with respect to iron and in a logarithmic scale) for the blue straggler stars observed in the globular cluster 47 Tuc ... "This is the first detection of a chemical signature clearly pointing to a specific scenario to form so-called 'Blue straggler stars' in a globular cluster", said Francesco Ferraro, from the Astronomy Department of Bologna... (Science Daily)
A 'Genetic Study' Of The Galaxy Sep 21, 2006
The globular cluster NGC 6528 is visible in the lower left corner. The image is a colour composite, based on images obtained in the B-, V-, and I-filters with the FORS instrument on the ESO VLT. The images were extracted from the ESO Science Archive and processed by Henri Boffin (ESO). (Science Daily)
Key stars have different birthdays Aug 26, 2006
A range of colours in globular clusters hints that something odd is going on ... Results from Hubble confirm what some had feared for years: stars in 'globular clusters' are born in several bursts, rather than all at once ... This means that globular clusters small, dense groups of stars found orbiting galaxies aren't as simple as astronomers used to think. (Nature News Service)
Dim stars on camera Aug 21, 2006
" In total, the research team trained Hubble's cameras on the same patch of sky for more than 75 hours, gathering 378 overlapping images. The target was a region of containing about one per cent of the globular cluster NGC 6397 a collection of stars that formed early in our galaxy's history. "When we look at random stars in the sky they have a variety of ages," Anderson said. "Globular clusters offer unique opportunities for astronomers to study a population of stars that are all the same... (Scenta.co.uk)
Faintest Flickers of Star Cluster Found Aug 19, 2006
The spherical collection of hundreds of thousands stars is what is known as a globular cluster and this newly-found bunch formed early on in the 13 ... Harvey Richer of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, led the observations and claims the faint find, dubbed NGC 6397, is among the dimmest star discoveries in a globular cluster to date ... Richer and his team used the white dwarfs in NGC 6397 to gauge the globular cluster s age to be nearly 12 billion years old. (Discovery Channel)
Hubble shines a light on dimmest stars in the universe Aug 19, 2006
They are the dimmest stars ever seen in a globular cluster - spherical concentrations of hundreds of thousands of stars - and they offer astronomers a valuable insight into the types of stars that existed in the early universe ... He said many of the stars in this globular cluster, NGC 6397, - one of about 150 in the Milky Way galaxy - have run out of the hydrogen fuel that sustains nuclear reactions of ordinary stars such as the Sun ... The stars in the globular cluster NGC 6397, which is 8,500... (Independent)
Mass cut-off between stars and brown dwarfs revealed Aug 18, 2006
Now, astronomers led by Harvey Richer of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, have used Hubble to find the faintest red dwarfs ever seen in a globular cluster. They looked at a relatively nearby cluster called NGC 6397, which is 8500 light years from Earth. (New Scientist Space)
Astronomers uncover faintest stars ever seen in star cluster Aug 18, 2006
This information provides important clues to the age of the globular cluster, which formed in the early universe ... "These stars, which died long ago, were among the first to have formed in the universe," said Richer, the world's leading expert in using white dwarfs as a tool for dating globular clusters. (People's Daily Online)
Hubble sees faintest stars in a globular cluster Aug 18, 2006
Globular clusters are spherical concentrations of hundreds-of-thousands of stars ... Astronomers have used white dwarfs in globular clusters as a measure of the universe's age ... A globular cluster's dimmest stars have eluded astronomers because their light is too feeble. (EurekAlert!)
Hubble images some of galaxy's dimmest stars Aug 18, 2006
Survey of nearby globular cluster pushes limits of orbiting observatory ... The target was a region of space containing about 1 percent of the globular cluster NGC 6397 a collection of stars that formed early in our galaxy's history ... "Globular clusters offer unique opportunities for astronomers to study a population of stars that are all the same age. All the stars we see in clusters are ancient, because they were created when the galaxy was forming. They're fossils from the galaxy's... (EurekAlert!)
Where did all the lithium go? Aug 11, 2006
By observing a set of stars in a distant globular cluster, Andreas Korn of Uppsala University in Sweden and colleagues in Denmark, France and Russia have concluded that the lithium diffuses over time into the stars' hot interiors, where it is then burnt up (Nature 442 657) ... Using a spectrometer on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, they studied 18 stars in a distant globular cluster called NGC 6397, which formed roughly a few hundred million years after the Big... (PhysicsWeb)
Stars are suspects in cosmic whodunit Aug 10, 2006
European Southern ObservatoryThe globular cluster NGC 6397 contains around 400,000 stars and is located about 7,200 light-years away in the constellation Ara ... Researchers trying to resolve this problem used the European Southern Observatory's in Chile to study a globular cluster containing half a million ancient stars called NGC 6397, located 7,200 light-years from Earth. (MSNBC -- Technology)
Island Universes With A Twist Jul 28, 2006
Using these and other VLT observations, astronomer Iskren Y. Georgiev from the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at Bonn (Germany) and his colleagues [3] were able to find 38 candidates globular clusters that are about 10 billion years old ... 3]: This result was published in "The old globular cluster system of the dIrr galaxy NGC 1427A in the Fornax cluster" by I.Y. Georgiev et al., Astronomy and Astrophysics, 452, 154 (2006) ... Two distinct types of star cluster can be distinguished:... (Science Daily)
Stream of stars into view Jun 14, 2006
Grillmair, a research scientist at the California Institute of Technology's Spitzer Science Center in Pasadena, believes the newly discovered galactic star stream stems from an ancient, or perhaps still existing, globular cluster, a tightly bunched collection of tens of thousands of stars ... This discovery, Grillmair notes, "gives new weight to a theory that the Milky Way may once have been swarming with thousands of giant star clusters." If so, "there may be hundreds or even thousands of such... (USA Today -- Tech)
Astrophotos: Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann's All Star Show May 24, 2006
Several days before Comet 73P shot across the Ring Nebula, astro-paparazzi caught the comet sneaking past , the Great Globular cluster in ... He also assembled each of 45 images taken into an movie that shows the comet passing the famous globular cluster. (Universe Today)
Astrophoto: Omega Centauri by Bernd Flach-Wilken and Volker Wendel May 20, 2006
But it was not until early in the last century, when Harlow Shapley measured the distance to several globular clusters like the one in this picture, that humanity next understood we were located far from the Milky Way's center, then believed to be the center of the Universe, and therefore even less special in the grand scheme of things ... These clumps of Suns are known as Globular Clusters and our galaxy has about two hundred of them orbiting its massive central region ... About nine years... (Universe Today)
What's Up This Week - April 24 - April 30, 2006 May 6, 2006
An alternative is to find one of the best northern hemisphere globular clusters - M3 ... At 35-40,000 light years distant, this awesome globular cluster spans 220 light years and is believed to be 10 billion years old. (Universe Today)
Magellanic Gemstones In The Southern Sky Apr 20, 2006
Star clusters can be held together tightly by gravity, as is the case with densely packed crowds of hundreds of thousands of stars, called globular clusters ... Most open clusters dissolve within a few hundred million years, whereas the more tightly bound globular clusters can exist for many billions of years ... Two distinct types of star cluster can be distinguished: globular clusters are tight groups of hundreds of thousands of very old. (Science Daily)
Astronomers Discover A River Of Stars Streaming Across The Northern Sky Mar 23, 2006
"It turns out that, because they were all born at the same time and are situated at roughly the same distance, the stars in globular clusters have a fairly unique signature when you look at how their colors and brightnesses are distributed," says Grillmair ... Two distinct types of star cluster can be distinguished: globular clusters are tight groups of hundreds of thousands of very old ... -- A globular cluster (sometimes known more simply as a globular) is a spherical collection of stars that... (Science Daily)
Andromeda's Stellar Halo Shows Galaxy's Origin To Be Similar To That Of Milky Way Mar 22, 2006
Posted: March 21, 2006. For the last decade, astronomers have thought that the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest galactic neighbor, was rather different from the Milky Way. (Science Daily)
Super-Earths May Be Three Times More Common Than Jupiters Mar 16, 2006
-- A globular cluster (sometimes known more simply as a globular) is a spherical collection of stars that orbits a galaxy as a satellite. Globular clusters are very tightly bound by gravity, which gives ... Two distinct types of star cluster can be distinguished: globular clusters are tight groups of hundreds of thousands of very old. (Science Daily)
Part-time Pulsar Yields New Insight Into Inner Workings Of Cosmic Clocks Mar 5, 2006
-- A globular cluster (sometimes known more simply as a globular) is a spherical collection of stars that orbits a galaxy as a satellite. Globular clusters are very tightly bound by gravity, which gives. (Science Daily)
The Milky Way Has Stolen Around One Million Stars from Nearby Cluster Feb 9, 2006
A star cluster (or globular cluster) is a spherical group of stars orbiting a galaxy as a satellite. The globular clusters are spherical due to gravity, which packs them very densely (in comparison to a galaxy) especially in their centre ... Globular clusters are a significant part of the history of astronomy because the Sun's position in the Milky Way galaxy has become known by studying them. (Softpedia)
Milky Way Steals Stars from Nearby Cluster Feb 8, 2006
Nearly a million stars seem to have gone missing from the nearby globular cluster Messier 12, located within the constellation Ophiuchus ... This makes Messier 12 an anomaly among the 200 known globular clusters in the Milky Way ... (The illustration above right depicts a possible star-stripping orbit for a globular cluster. (Scientific American)
How To Steal A Million Stars? Feb 8, 2006
An artist's impression of the orbit of the globular cluster Messier 12 in the Milky Way ... The team, which also includes Luigi Pulone and Francesco Paresce (INAF, Italy), measured the brightness and colours of more than 16,000 stars within the globular cluster Messier 12 [2] with the FORS1 multi-mode instrument attached to one of the Unit Telescopes of ESO's VLT at Cerro Paranal (Chile) ... Globular clusters move in extended elliptical orbits that periodically take them through the densely... (Science Daily)
