Measuring galaxy evolution with globular clusters

Globular clusters are gravitationally bound ensembles of stars, as many as a million stars in some cases, grouped in roughly spherical clusters with diameters as small as only tens of light-years. Globular clusters are typically ...

Far from home: Wayward cluster is both tiny and distant

Like the lost little puppy that wanders too far from home, astronomers have found an unusually small and distant group of stars that seems oddly out of place. The cluster, made of only a handful of stars, is located far away, ...

Why does the Milky Way rotate?

We live in a galaxy that is called the Milky Way. It's called a barred spiral galaxy, which means that it has a spiral shape with a bar of stars across its middle. The galaxy is rather huge—at least 100,000 light-years ...

Image: Hubble sees an ancient globular cluster

This image captures the stunning NGC 6535, a globular cluster 22,000 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens (The Serpent) that measures one light-year across.

Wild ducks take flight in open cluster

The Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile has taken this beautiful image, dappled with blue stars, of one of the most star-rich open clusters currently known—Messier ...

A spectacular landscape of star formation

This image, captured by the Wide Field Imager at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, shows two dramatic star formation regions in the Milky Way. The first, on the left, is dominated by the star cluster NGC 3603, located ...

Cell membrane proteins give up their secrets

Rice University scientists have succeeded in analyzing transmembrane protein folding in the same way they study the proteins' free-floating, globular cousins.

Deeper insights into protein folding

Investigating the structure and dynamics of so-called Meso-Bio-Nano (MBN) systems—micron-sized biological or nanotechnology entities—is a rapidly expanding field of science. Now, scientists Alexander Yakubovich and Andrey ...

page 20 from 26