Astronomers discover a massive star cluster, of intermediate age, in the constellation Scutum
Published Date: 6/2/2021
Source: phys.org
An international team of astrophysicists led by the Stellar Astrophysics Group of the University of Alicante (UA), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), and the University of Valparaíso (Chile) has discovered a massive cluster of stars of intermediate age in the direction of the Scutum constellation. This object, which has been named Valparaíso 1, lies some seven thousand light years away from the Sun, and contains at least fifteen thousand stars. To detect it, observations have been combined from ESA's Gaia satellite, and various ground-based telescopes, including the Isaac Newton Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands). The result has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).