Via our friends at Space.com, it appears nearly a million stars are missing from a globular cluster! Recount Results: A Million Stars Missing
Call it a slip-up in stellar record keeping. A new survey finds that the globular cluster Messier 12 actually has about one million fewer stars than astronomers had long assumed.
Italian researchers made the discovery when they actually counted the stars in Messier 12 using the European Space Agency’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
Messier 12 is located about 23,000 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. It is one of about 200 known globular clusters in the Milky Way. The number of stars in a cluster can range from 10,000 to more than a million.
Science is a beautiful thing.
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3 comments:
That is very odd. They were there, before, now they're not? I agree that a recount is needed.
Nahh, they just measured wrong.
It's interesting, though.
Diebold made the telescope used in the first count.
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