Thursday, September 11, 2014

ScienceDaily: Galaxies News

ScienceDaily: Galaxies News


This star cluster is not what it seems: Messier 54 shows lithium problem also applies outside our galaxy

Posted: 10 Sep 2014 05:33 AM PDT

A new image from the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in northern Chile shows a vast collection of stars, the globular cluster Messier 54. This cluster looks very similar to many others but it has a secret. Messier 54 doesn't belong to the Milky Way, but is part of a small satellite galaxy, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. This unusual parentage has now allowed astronomers to use the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to test whether there are also unexpectedly low levels of the element lithium in stars outside the Milky Way.

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