Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, December 31 (Xinhua) astronomers at the Shanghai Observatory have discovered 101new open star clusters (open clusters) in the Milky way by analyzing data from the ESA Gaia satellite. The findings were published in a pre-printed paper by arXiv on December 21.

CTOnews.com learned that an open cluster is a celestial body made up of hundreds to thousands of stars connected by weaker gravity, usually no more than a few decades light-years across. The density of stars in open clusters varies, but the density of stars in open clusters is much lower than that in globular clusters.

Open clusters are found only in regions where stars are actively formed, including the spiral arms of spiral galaxies and irregular galaxies. Open clusters are generally young, only millions of years old, younger than many of the rocks on Earth.

So far, more than 1000 such clusters have been found in the Milky way, and scientists are still looking for more clusters, hoping to find various combinations of such stars. A detailed study of them may be essential to improve our understanding of the formation and evolution of the Milky way.

The study, led by Qin Songmei of the Shanghai Observatory, found 101 new open star clusters near the solar system. This discovery is the result of clustering algorithms pyUPMASK and HDSBSCAN using Gaia data release 3 (DR3).

Songmei's team successfully identified 324 open star clusters, 101 of which were previously unreported. As a result, the discovery increases the number of known open star clusters nearby (within 1600 light-years of Earth) by about 45 per cent. When it comes to the 223 known clusters, their parameters are updated with the previous catalogue by carefully comparing the spatial distribution and other attributes.

For more information:

More information: Songmei Qin et al, Hunting for Neighboring Open Clusters with Gaia DR3: 101 New Open Clusters within 500 pc, arXiv (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2212.11034

Journal information: arXiv

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