Tomasz Nowakowski is a member of the physics.org community.
Astronomers from the China West Normal University have found over a thousand new star clusters in the universe. There is a research paper on the arXiv pre-print repository.
A star cluster is a group of stars. They're seen as important laboratories for studying the evolution of stars. The structure of the Milky Way can be explored with the help of scs.
About 100,000 star clusters are thought to be contained in the Milky Way. The researchers think that there are still undiscovered clusters.
More than 1,600 scs were found in the disk of the Milky Way. The discovery is the result of the early third data release from the satellite. There is a great opportunity to study cluster membership with the abundance of stellar radial velocity provided by EDR3.
We focused on searching for SCs that were in motion. The analysis was based on the data from the observatory. The researchers said that the new findings increased the sample size and the number of clusters to about 6,000.
The team used the EDR3 data to perform a blind search of the plane beyond 3,900 light years from the sun. They used a machine learning method.
More than 48,000 member stars were found after clustering and cross-matching with existing clusters. The sizes and motion dispersions are consistent with the currently identified clusters and the photometric data shows that they had the appearance of a cluster color-magnitude diagram.
Within 16,000 light years away from the Earth, the new SCs are located. They suffer from a much greater degree of extinction than nearby clusters.
Since fainter old clusters were difficult to detect, it is reasonable to believe that there are still undiscovered clusters.
Most newly discovered SCs were found to have photometric signatures. The study identified a cluster that looked similar to a globular cluster. The cluster is 12,600 light years away.
More information: Zhihong He, Xiaochen Liu, Yangping Luo, Kun Wang, Qingquan Jiang, Unveiling hidden stellar aggregates in the Milky Way: 1656 new star clusters found in Gaia EDR3. arXiv:2209.08504v1 [astro-ph.GA], arxiv.org/abs/2209.08504There is a science network.
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