New telescope images reveal a previously unknown rich cluster of stars in the inner parts of the Milky Way.This closely-packed star family, consisting of about 100,000 stars and located some 30,000 light-years away, was spotted with the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope (NTT) at La Silla, Chile.
The discovery was part of a large-scale search for globular clusters in the Galactic Plane—a slice of space in which the star-rich disk of our galaxy lies. Globular clusters are gravity-bound groups of stars with spherical symmetry created at roughly the same time and from the same material. Typically, they are shrouded by dense clouds of gas and dust in the Milky Way, so infrared radiation is the only mechanism to locate such features.
After locating about a dozen clusters with the near-infrared Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), astronomers took new images through three different near-infrared filters—producing images that are 10 times deeper and much more precise than the 2MASS images.
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