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The first known globular cluster, now called M 22, was discovered in 1665 by Abraham Ihle, a German amateur astronomer. [4] [5] [6] The cluster Omega Centauri, easily visible in the southern sky with the naked eye, was known to ancient astronomers like Ptolemy as a star, but was reclassified as a nebula by Edmond Halley in 1677, [7] then finally as a globular cluster in the early 19th century ...
Globular clusters are among the oldest objects in the Milky Way, which thus set a lower limit on the age of the Milky Way. The ages of individual stars in the Milky Way can be estimated by measuring the abundance of long-lived radioactive elements such as thorium-232 and uranium-238 , then comparing the results to estimates of their original ...
These are globular clusters within the halo of the Milky Way galaxy. The diameter is in minutes of arc as seen from Earth. For reference, the J2000 epoch celestial coordinates of the Galactic Center are right ascension 17 h 45 m 40.04 s, declination −29° 00′ 28.1″.
The term "The Local Group" was introduced by Edwin Hubble in Chapter VI of his 1936 book The Realm of the Nebulae. [11] There, he described it as "a typical small group of nebulae which is isolated in the general field" and delineated, by decreasing luminosity, its members to be M31, Milky Way, M33, Large Magellanic Cloud, Small Magellanic Cloud, M32, NGC 205, NGC 6822, NGC 185, IC 1613 and ...
In the Milky Way galaxy, globular clusters are distributed roughly spherically in the galactic halo, around the Galactic Center, orbiting the center in highly elliptical orbits. In 1917, the astronomer Harlow Shapley made the first respectable estimate of the Sun's distance from the Galactic Center, based on the distribution of globular clusters.
Located at a distance of 17,090 light-years (5,240 parsecs), it is the largest known globular cluster in the Milky Way at a diameter of roughly 150 light-years. [10] It is estimated to contain approximately 10 million stars, with a total mass of 4 million solar masses, [11] making it the most massive known globular cluster in the Milky Way.
Described in February 2022, the fast radio burst was found within a cluster of stars, called a globular cluster, on the outskirts of galaxy Messier 81, located 12 million light-years from Earth.
An open cluster is a type of star cluster made of tens to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud and have roughly the same age. More than 1,100 open clusters have been discovered within the Milky Way galaxy, and many more are thought to exist. [1]