96 New Star Clusters !

[CraigS]

More stars uncovered …

VISTA finds 96 star clusters hidden behind dust

Using data from the VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, an international team of astronomers has discovered 96 new open clusters hidden by the dust in the Milky Way.
...
By using carefully tuned computer software, the team was able to remove the foreground stars appearing in front of each cluster in order to count the genuine cluster members. Afterwards, they made visual inspections of the images to measure the cluster sizes, and for the more populous clusters they made other measurements such as distance, age, and the amount of reddening of their starlight caused by interstellar dust between them and us.

"We found that most of the clusters are very small and only have about 10-20 stars. Compared to typical open clusters, these are very faint and compact objects -- the dust in front of these clusters makes them appear 10 000 to 100 million times fainter in visible light. It's no wonder they were hidden," explains Radostin Kurtev, another member of the team.
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Since antiquity only 2500 open clusters have been found in the Milky Way, but astronomers estimate there might be as many as 30 000 still hiding behind the dust and gas.

… one for those image processers out there ... one step beyond skyglow removal, eh ? (Mind you they used the 4.1m VISTA infrared setup to do it).

96 down, ~30K more clusters to go ! Cool !

Cheers

[multiweb (Marc)]

Those IR scopes are pretty amazing. I heard the mirrors are gold plated. I posted a link here about some cool video a little while ago. It shows familiar nebulae, Magellanic clouds and even the whole Milkyway in IR. Amazing stuff.

[renormalised (Carl)]

It's no wonder they were hidden

That's an understatement!!!. 10-20 stars...it's a wonder they were able to even distinguish them from the background "noise" at all. And, being so dimmed by the dust would make the job even harder. 30000 OC's is probably even a conservative estimate, but still, that's a lot of star clusters.

Yeah, gold plated mirrors. Might just take the mirror down to the bank and cash it in!!!!

You can buy gold plated mirrors from RCOS and PlaneWave Instruments. Don't know how much they are, but if you're into IR research etc, you can get one for your scope.