Tomasz Nowakowski is a member of the physics.org community.
Astronomers from the Radboud University in the Netherlands and other places have used the Keck Observatory to observe a young massive cluster. The results of the observational campaign were published on the arXiv pre-prints server.
Young massive clusters are dense clumps of young stars that make up the building blocks of the universe. Information about stellar populations can be provided by studying their chemical composition.
Located some 6,000 light years away from the Earth, the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 1569-B is thought to be 15 to 25 million years old. NGC 1569-B is larger than any of the young clusters in the LMC. It's rare to find such massive clusters in the local group.
The high-resolution echelle spectrometer (HIRES) on the Keck I 10-m telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii was used to investigate NGC 1569-B. They wanted to perform a detailed chemical abundance analysis.
We did a high-resolution spectrum analysis of the YMCNG 1569-B. The researchers wrote in the paper that this is the first detailed abundance study of the YMC.
The metallicity of NGC 1569-B was measured to be about 0.77 and it was found to be slightly metal poor. It shows alpha and the majority of the iron peak element abundance ratios. The cluster has a large amount of titanium.
The results show that NGC 1569-B has a high abundance of both iron and barium. There is no evidence to support the idea that this could be caused by massive stars.
Scandium to iron was found to be high. Further studies of the chemical composition of NGC 1569-B are needed to find a plausible hypothesis.
The researchers noted that the chemical abundances of NGC 1569-B were similar to those of another YMC.
The stellar populations of the YMC are found in a blue compact dwarf. The two YMCs agree that Sc and Ba are super-solar and higher than any other YMC studied so far.
More information: Anastasia Gvozdenko, Søren S. Larsen, Michael A. Beasley, Jean Brodie, Chemical composition of the young massive cluster NGC 1569-B. arXiv:2209.11779v1 [astro-ph.GA], arxiv.org/abs/2209.11779There is a science network.
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