Scientists have published photos of the open cluster Teutsch 76 (T76). Preprint article about it published at archive.org.
Consisting of a giant molecular cloud, open clusters are groups of stars that are gravitationally weakly bound together. More than 1,000 such objects have been discovered in the Milky Way to date, and astronomers continue to look for them.
Saurab Sharma of the ARIES Indian Institute in India and colleagues photographed Teutsch 76 with the 3.6-metre DOT telescope to better understand the properties of this cluster. The study was supported by data from the European Gaia satellite and the Pan-STARRS1 ground-based telescopes.
“Using the TIFR-ARIES near-infrared spectrometer recently installed on the 3.6-metre telescope aboard Devastal, we performed a detailed analysis of this cluster to understand its evolutionary dynamics,” the researchers write in the paper.
The study found that T76 has a radius of about 4.04 light-years and is estimated to be 50 million years old. The cluster’s distance from Earth is about 18,600 light years.
Expanding the list of known open clusters and examining them in detail can be crucial to understanding the evolution of the galaxy and universe.
old Russian astronomer saidOn the night of February 15-16, which large asteroid passed by the Earth.