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. ...

... 1st Announcement IAU Symposium 312 Star Clusters and Black Holes Across Cosmic Time, Beijing, China, Aug. 25-29, 2014 . ... SUBJECT: 1st Announcement IAU Symposium 312 Star Clusters and Black Holes Across Cosmic Time, Beijing, China, Aug. 25-29, 2014 . ... which will be held in Beijing, P.R. China, from August 25-29, 2014, hosted by Chinese Academy of Sciences . ... China), . ... 1st Announcement IAU Symposium 312 Star Clusters and Black Holes Across Cosmic Time, Beijing, China, Aug. ...

... All previous such superstars have been found along with many companion stars in the centres of crowded star clusters. The star is known as VFTS 682 from the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey catalogue of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) located at Paranal in Chile by means of the attached FLAMES instrument. ... Although VFTS 682 seems to be alone now it is not very far away from a very rich star cluster known as RMC 136 that contains several similar superstars. ...

You Can Make Stellar Images Brighter . Articles | ... A few months ago I wrote an article titled "You Can’t Make Them Brighter". So why am I now writing that you can make them brighter. ... The image of a focused star is actually a small disk called the Airy disk, named after the 19 th century scientist Sir George Airy. ... For a given aperture, a smaller Airy disk means that the light is focused to a smaller disk and is therefore brighter. ... www.astronomy.net . About Astronomy Net | ...

home publications > mercury . ... Big Clusters, Tiny Galaxies . ... Astronomers struggle to understand why giant star clusters form in the tiniest of galaxies . ... These clusters are probably young versions of globular clusters, but they are commonly called super star clusters. Seven dwarf galaxies within 16 million light-years have formed super star clusters, with one of these galaxies, NGC 1569, possessing two young clusters. ... Super star clusters have a lot to tell us about star formation. ...

... 87.1083Owen+ VIII/29 1400-MHz Survey of 1478 Abell Clusters of Galaxies (Owen+ 1982) ================================================================================ A 1400-MHz Survey of 1478 Abell Clusters of Galaxies Owen F.N., White R.A., Hilldrup K.C., Hanisch R.J. =1982AJ.. ... 0,] Major axis error 70- 71 A2 --- n_MajAxi *[ A, B, C,NR, ] Major axis note 73- 74 I2 arcmin MinAxi *? ... Note on dist-C: Ratio of the distance of the source from the cluster center to the corrected Abell cluster...

... Astrophysics Group . ... AMI Science . ... Observations of galaxy clusters are central to the AMI science programme. The AMI Small Array is used to observe already-known clusters with high-sensitivity and resolution, allowing us to extract detailed information about individual clusters and to build up statistics about the cluster population. ... Observing galaxy clusters at 15 GHz is tricky because of the contamination from foreground radio sources, which is where the Large Array comes in! ...

... LMC Project Outline . NGC 1818 Initial Results . ... The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is uniquely suitable for the study of massive star clusters at all stages of evolution. By combining HST observations of these clusters with N-body models we hope to understand the origin and evolution of rich star clusters in our own Galaxy, in the LMC, and beyond. ... We aim to combine our HST observations with N-body models to understand the formation and evolution of globular clusters. ...

... Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are located in external galaxies, their X-ray luminosities (10 39 - 10 41 erg/s) are thousand times greater than those of brightest black holes in the Galaxy. ULXs may be supercritical accretion disks around black holes of stellar masses (~10 Solar masses) like that in SS433, or they may be a hypothetical intermediate-mass black holes (hundreds - thousands Solar masses) with standard accretion disks. ... 2) The ULX progenitors were ejected from the star clusters. ...

... Neutral and Ionised Hydrogen in NGC 4214 V. J. McIntyre1,2 1 2 Physics Department, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia Astrophysics Department, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia vjm@physics.usyd.edu.au Abstract: It is not clear at present how the diffuse ionised gas (DIG) component in galaxies is ionised. ... How porous the ISM must be depends on the (unknown) location of the ionised emission relative to the disk. ... 1996). ... Local H I surface density is 2в1021 cm-3 ...