Here’s a hand-wavy attempt: a galaxy is a collection of stars, gas, dust and dark matter all held together by mutual gravity. At the lower end of the scale, some very small galaxies could be ...
For decades, astronomers assumed that all young star clusters shake off their birth clouds on roughly the same schedule. A ...
Globular star clusters are extraordinary in almost every way. They’re densely packed, holding a million stars in a ball only about 100 light-years across on average. They’re old, dating back almost to ...
Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...
Astronomers from the University of Texas at Austin and Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) recently found a surprise when studying some of the oldest star clusters in our ...
A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars. Globular clusters are very tightly bound by gravity, giving them their spherical shapes and high concentrations of stars toward their centers.
Searching for ET? Check out one of the Milky Way's 150 or so globular star clusters. That's where you'll find the sort of quiet, well-established stellar neighborhoods that might provide favorable ...
KISSIMMEE, Fla. — Densely packed groups of stars may make excellent cradles for complex space-traveling life to evolve. Despite studies that claim these environments, known as globular clusters, may ...
A strange, newly measured clump of stars orbiting the nearby Andromeda galaxy has the lowest level of heavy chemical elements ever seen in one of these mysterious star clusters. Named RBC EXT8, this ...
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the globular cluster Fornax 2 in the dwarf galaxy Fornax. New observations of this cluster and three others in the galaxy show that they are very ...
Globular star clusters are extraordinary in almost every way. They're densely packed, holding a million stars in a ball only about 100 light-years across on average. They're old, dating back almost to ...