... 2004 September 18 . M55: Globular Star Cluster . ... Explanation: The fifty-fifth entry in Charles Messier's catalog, M55 is a large and lovely globular cluster of around 100,000 stars. ... Globular star clusters like M55 roam the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy as gravitationally bound populations of stars known to be much older than stellar groups found in the galactic disk. Astronomers who make detailed studies of globular cluster stars can accurately measure the cluster ages and distances. ...

... 22.09.2000 . ... Credit: B.J. Mochejska , J. Kaluzny ( CAMK ), 1m Swope Telescope Explanation: The fifty-fifth entry in Charles Messier's catalog, M55 is a large and lovely globular cluster of around 100,000 stars. ... Astronomers who make detailed studies of globular cluster stars can accurately measure the cluster ages and distances. ... Publications with keywords: star cluster - cluster - globular cluster - m55 . Publications with words: star cluster - cluster - globular cluster - m55 . ...

... 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. ...

... 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. ...

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. ...

... 2000 August 4 . M15: Dense Globular Star Cluster . ... In fact, only 40,000 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, M15 is one of the most densely packed globular star clusters in our Milky Way Galaxy. This stunning Hubble Space Telescope image of M15 shows thousands of individual stars across the central 10 or so light-years of the cluster, also cataloged as NGC 7078. ... Globular star clusters harbor from a hundred thousand up to a million stars and roam the Milky Way halo. ...

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! ...

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... Astronomers experienced the same thing, only this time they photographed a dwarf galaxy , and a globular cluster blocked the view. ... A globular cluster is a collection of old stars that orbits a galaxy. ... This particular globular cluster is orbiting the Milky Way our home galaxy. ... Light travels faster than anything in the world, so you could say that this cluster is enormous! ... Astronomers are lucky that the globular cluster insisted on being on camera, as they can now study it in detail. ...

This huge elliptical galaxy NGC 5128 (Centaurus A) is the closest such galaxy to Earth, at a distance of about 12 million light-years. Observations with ESO s Very Large Telescope in Chile have discovered a new class of dark globular star clusters around this galaxy. ... Normal globulars are marked in blue and globulars showing similar properties to dwarf galaxies are in green. The dark globulars appear very similar to other globulars around this galaxy but contain much more mass. ...