Globular star clusters as a research area focuses on dense, gravitationally bound stellar systems that orbit galactic halos and serve as laboratories for studying stellar dynamics, stellar evolution, and galactic formation and assembly. Research investigates their internal kinematics, mass functions, multiple stellar populations, chemical abundance patterns, and dynamical processes such as core collapse, mass segregation, and tidal stripping. Globular clusters are also key to constraining ages of galaxies, tracing dark matter distributions, and testing N-body simulations, stellar population synthesis models, and theories of star formation under extreme density and low-metallicity conditions.
The galaxy Centaurus A is about 11 million light-years away and is the fifth-brightest galaxy in the sky. Because it's so bright, it's been studied extensively by amateur and professional astronomers alike. Also called NGC ...
Astronomy
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Astronomers using computer simulations have investigated whether a class of star clusters nicknamed "cosmic wallflowers" could be the long-sought ancestors of the globular clusters we see orbiting galaxies today. Their paper, ...
More than 500,000 stars blaze red, white, and blue in this image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, released in celebration of the United States' 250th anniversary. The image showcases Messier 3 (M3), one of the Milky Way ...
Astronomy
Jul 3, 2026
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The subject of today's NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is an ancient inhabitant of our galaxy. This sparkling scene features a globular cluster: a collection of tens of thousands to millions of stars, all tightly bound ...
Astronomy
Jun 26, 2026
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Researchers using two of humanity's most powerful observatories—NASA's James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes—have definitively shown that Terzan 5 is not a globular star cluster, as it was once classified, offering new insight ...
Astronomy
Jun 16, 2026
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Using NASA's Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have performed deep X-ray observations of a galactic globular cluster known as NGC 6540. The new observational campaign, described June 1 on the preprint server arXiv, focused ...
Astronomers have identified a possible new example of one of the universe's strangest galaxy types: galaxies that appear to contain little or no dark matter. The newly studied pair, FCC 224 and FCC 240, on the outskirts of ...
Scientists from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, sought to study one stellar subject and ended up finding something even more exciting. The team's results published today in Astronomy ...
Astronomy
Jun 3, 2026
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The most massive black holes in the universe detected by the ripples they make in spacetime were not born directly from collapsing stars, according to a new study. These cosmic giants instead build up through a series of ...
Astronomy
May 7, 2026
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Messier 104, nicknamed the Sombrero Galaxy, is a popular target for amateur observing and astronomical research. Its recognizable extended halo, as well as a faint stellar stream, are captured in exquisite detail in this ...
Astronomy
Apr 24, 2026
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