Scientists Find 96 New Star Clusters In The Milky Way! Rock.

Enlarge. | Via.

Stars form in big ass groups known as open clusters. People smarter than me have tabulated that there should be about 30,000 of these sons a bitches lurking out in the Milky Way. Limited as we are, we haven’t found nearly that many.

Recently however, we found 96 more. Stick with it, boyos!

io9:

There should be about 30,000 clusters in the Milky Way, but we’ve only ever found 2,500. Now, you can raise that number to 2,596.

The VISTA Variables telescope, an infrared telescope housed at the European Southern Observatory’s Panaral Observatory in Chile, was responsible for detecting 96 new open clusters through the thick cosmic dust. It’s particularly difficult finding these open clusters because they’re composed of young stars about half the mass of our Sun, meaning they give off relatively little light, and they generally form in naturally dusty regions that block and absorb most of that light.

This means that it’s difficult to see much evidence at all of these open cluster in the visible wavelengths that we’re used to, so we have to turn to huge infrared telescopes to have much chance of seeing them. The 96 newly discovered clusters represent the single biggest discovery of such clusters ever, and the hope is that further observations of the galaxy with the infrared telescope will reveal tons more of these clusters.

It’s nauseatingly amazing how big our own galaxy is, let alone the Universe.