Today's APOD | ... Editor's choices for the most educational Astronomy Pictures of the Day about open clusters: . APOD: 2006 January 9 - M45: The Pleiades Star Cluster . ... The Pleiades contains over 3000 stars, is about 400 light years away, and only 13 light years across. ... Two types of star clusters are visible in our Milky Way Galaxy : open clusters and globular clusters . ... Aged 80 million years, M47 is a smaller but looser cluster of about 50 stars spanning 10 light-years. ... Index | ...

... Galactic or open star clusters are relatively young swarms of bright stars born together near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. Separated by about a degree on the sky, two nice examples are M46 (upper left) 5,400 light-years in the distance and M47 (lower right) only 1,600 light-years away toward the nautical constellation Puppis . Around 300 million years young M46 contains a few hundred stars in a region about 30 light-years across. ... M7: Open Star Cluster in Scorpius . ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Last week's Snack talked about how black holes can affect the environment around them in such a way as to be very bright . ... It's a common misconception that black holes always have matter swirling into them. ... As this matter gets closer and closer to the black hole it piles up and a large, fairly flat disk forms. This is called the accretion disk , because matter from this disk accretes (that is, falls in) on the black hole. ... 2008 Phil Plait. ...

... The Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters and Messier 45, is a conspicuous object in the night sky with a prominent place in ancient mythology . ... The stars in the Pleiades are thought to have formed together around 100 million years ago, making them 1/50th the age of our sun, and they lie some 130 parsecs (425 light years ) away. ... Data for these stars are listed in a table below. ... Yes . ... WEBDA Pleiades cluster data . ... M45: The Pleiades Star Cluster (2007 November 18) ...

... The ball of stars at the centre of this photograph is unbelievably old. ... This group of stars, called a globular cluster, is actually 10 billion years old that's almost as old as the universe itself! Globular clusters contain tens of thousands of ancient stars that all formed around the same time, from the same material. But strangely, these clusters sometimes contain stars that look suspiciously young, raising the question: are these clusters really the ancient relics that we believe? ...

... Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. September 17, 1999 . M3: Half A Million Stars . ... Explanation: This immense ball of half a million stars older than the sun lies 30,000 light-years above the plane of our Galaxy. Cataloged as M 3 (and NGC 5272), it is one of about 250 globular star clusters which roam our galactic halo . ... About APOD > . ... NASA Technical Rep.: ...

... Kalirai and Harvey Richer of the University of British Columbia led the study, which began as an investigation of a globular star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy known as NGC 6397. ... Within the population of stars and galaxies behind NGC 6397, the Hubble image revealed a large elliptical galaxy that contains several hundred globular clusters. ... In fact, a single giant star in NGC 6397 appears 10 million times brighter than one of the distant globular clusters. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Comets and Asteroids . ... Image credit:ESO/J.Emerson/VISTA. ... However others are less pessimistic and it has even been claimed that the mysterious ?Wow! signal? received in 1977 originated from the direction M55.б  Sadly, this still unexplained pulse of radio energy originated from a location rather to the northwest of M55 so I doubt if the source was this cluster (if indeed the signal was genuinely of extraterrestrial origin). ... Mysterious Wow! ...

... BLUE STRAGGLER STARS are unusually hot and bright stars found in the cores of ancient star clusters known as globulars. ... BACKGROUND (from wikipedia): Blue straggler stars are stars in open or globular clusters that are hotter and bluer than other cluster stars having the same luminosity. ... There is evidence in favor of this view, notably that blue straggler stars appear to be much more common in dense regions of clusters, especially in the cores of globular clusters. ...

... Embedded within this view are 2,753 star clusters. The view is 61,600 light-years across and contains images of 117 million stars in the galaxy's disk. Bottom-Left] An enlargement of the boxed field in the top image reveals myriad stars and numerous open star clusters as bright blue knots. Hubble's bird's-eye view of M31 allowed astronomers to conduct a larger-than-ever sampling of star clusters that are all at the same distance from Earth, 2.5 million light-years. ...

Stellar Clusters are very useful laboratories for empirically studying stellar evolution. ... All cluster stars are at the same distance . All cluster stars have the same physical age . ... CM diagram Young Cluster In this case we see the Main Sequence fully represented. The blue dots represent massive stars with short main sequence lifetimes. ... Thus, identifying the most massive star which is still on the main sequence is an effective means of determining the age of a stellar cluster. ...