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Infrared lifts the veil on a golden city


Liller 1

(Source: Gemini Observatory/AURA )

Colliding stars This beautiful golden jewel of tightly packed stars near the centre of our galaxy is normally hidden by dust.

But powerful technology has enabled astronomers to penetrate the dense fog surrounding Liller 1 to reveal an unprecedented ultra-sharp view of this vast stellar city.

Located in the constellation Sagittarius, some 30,000 light-years away, the Liller 1 globular cluster contains a total mass of at least 1.5 million Suns.

Globular clusters are tightly packed spheres of stars thought to have all originated from the same stellar nursery.

The congested overcrowded central region of Liller 1 is so closely packed together that it may be a good place for astronomers to see stars colliding.

Astronomers want to study stellar collisions to understand the origins of exotic objects that cannot be studied by looking at single stars like the Sun.

Nearly head-on collisions in which the stars actually merge, mixing their nuclear fuel and re-stoking the fires of nuclear fusion are believed to be a likely origin for stars known as blue stragglers.

Stars in close binary systems can also orbit into each other and collide producing exotic objects like low mass X-ray binaries and millisecond pulsars, which are old neutron stars that have been re-accelerated to millisecond rotational speeds after accreting material from a companion star in a binary system.

Liller 1 has the highest level of emission of gamma rays of any globular cluster, and astronomers think this may be due to a large number of stellar collisions and exotic objects like pulsars.

The image was taken by the 8-metre Gemini South Telescope in Chile, which combines an advanced adaptive optics system to remove the turbulence and distortions in Earth's atmosphere, with a powerful near-infrared camera.

Hosted by Stuart Gary, StarStuff takes us on a weekly journey across the universe. StarStuff reports on the latest news and discoveries in science, with a special focus on astronomy, space sciences and cosmology.

Tags: the-universe, physics, stars, galaxies