Stellar 'swarms' help astronomers understand the evolution of stars

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

New work from Carnegie's Jonathan Gagné and the American Museum of Natural History's Jacqueline Faherty identified nearly a thousand potential members and 31 confirmed members of stellar associations—stars of similar ages and compositions that are drifting together through space—in our own corner of the Milky Way. Their work, published in the Astrophysical Journal, could help astronomers understand the evolution of stars and the properties of future exoplanet discoveries.

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Sagittarius A* Black Hole Swarm

This movie sequence begins with a ground-based image of the giant globular star cluster Omega Centauri and zooms very tightly in to a Hubble Space Telescope image of the central region of the cluster.

In a simulation based on Hubble data, the stars appear to be moving in random directions, like a swarm of bees.