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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

A new image of NGC 6362 star field


The European Southern Observatory (ESO) today released a new image of the globular cluster NGC 6362; a little known field stars located in the group of Ara consists of tens of thousands of stars very old and others looking surprisingly young.


The picture, which was taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at ESO's La Silla Observatory in northern Chile, allows seeing many stars that formed about 10,000 million years and have already become old asteroids red giants.

However, the cluster also houses most luminous blue stars and apparently younger, that should have been off with his companions.

Astronomers have studied this phenomenon for years, managing two theories: they are stars that are formed by collision and fusion between them or that are created from a transfer of material between two companion stars.

Both approaches share the basic idea that these apparently younger stars were born not as large as seen today, but received an injection of extra material sometime life handed them.
The European Southern Observatory is an intergovernmental organization consisting of 14 European countries and Brazil, and Chile operates two observatories at Cerro Paranal and Chajnantor.

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