Indian astronomers photographed an open cluster at a distance of 18.6 thousand light years. years
Scientists have published photographs of the open cluster Teutsch 76 (T76). A preprint of an article about this is published at arxiv.org.
Open clusters, formed from one giant molecular cloud, are groups of stars that are weakly gravitationally bound to each other. To date, more than 1,000 such objects have been discovered in the Milky Way, and astronomers continue to search for them.
Saurab Sharma of the Indian ARIES Institute in India and colleagues photographed Teutsch 76 with the 3.6-meter DOT telescope to better understand the cluster’s properties. The study was supplemented by data from the European Gaia satellite and Pan-STARRS1 ground-based telescopes.
“We conducted a detailed analysis of this cluster to understand its evolutionary dynamics using the TIFR-ARIES near-infrared spectrometer, recently installed on the 3.6-meter telescope at Devastal,” the researchers write in the paper.
The study found that T76 has a radius of approximately 4.04 light years and is estimated to be 50 million years old. The distance to the cluster from Earth is approximately 18,600 light-years.
Expanding the list of known open clusters and studying them in detail could be crucial for understanding the evolution of the galaxy and the universe.
Earlier, a Russian astronomer told what a large asteroid flew past the Earth on the night of February 15-16.
