‘Hidden’ star clusters come to light
Using data from the ESO’s VISTA telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered 96 new open clusters hidden by the dust in the Milky Way.
Alan Boyle:
If you’re looking for hidden treasures, the dusty disk of our Milky Way galaxy might not be the first place you’d look. But that’s exactly where the European Southern Observatory found almost a hundred glittering prizes.
These 30 pictures show just a portion of the treasure trove: 96 open star clusters hiding in the galaxy’s dusty core. These stars can’t be seen in the visible-light spectrum because they’re shrouded within clouds of dust, but the ESO’s VISTA infrared survey telescope is able to see through the dust. And that’s not all: Sophisticated software was able to remove the glare of foreground stars, allowing the dimmer clusters to stand out.
Why go to all that trouble? Well, astronomers surmise that the majority of stars that are at least 50 percent bigger than our own sun are formed within these types of open clusters, and yet not that many of them have been seen — primarily due to all that pesky dust. Getting a better read on the distribution and composition of open clusters will provide new pieces to the puzzle of our galaxy’s formation.
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Building a VISTA image
Because the VISTA camera has large gaps between the chips multiple images need to be taken at slightly different pointings so that an image covering a contiguous piece of sky can be reconstructed. This picture shows how six different “paw print” exposures are combined to make one “tile”, shown on the right.