The Largest Known Population of Globular Star Clusters     Hubble has discovered the largest known population of globular star clusters in the universe thus far. It may not seem like it at first but the photo shows 160,000 star clusters! To give you some perspective our Milky Way galaxy has about 150 star clusters. What does observing star clusters do for us exactly? Well studying globular star clusters helps astronomers understand the formation of galaxies. Not only that but it also leaves clues of how much dark matter these clusters hold. Globular clusters actually formed in the first 1-2 billion years after the Big Bang. This system that you are looking at right now is located 2.25 billion light-years away! It’s hard to imagine that distance but it holds the record of farthest system observed by Hubble.     Now how do these scientists know how much dark...

Andromeda Holds the Record of Most Black Holes Found in a Galaxy Other than Our Own Milky Way     Andromeda or M31 is one of the most famous galaxies in astronomy. It’s located 2.5 million light years away and it’s on a collision course with our galaxy the Milky Way. NASA’s Chandra observatory has been observing the universe in the x-ray wavelength and discovering black holes all across the universe. For the last 13 years with 152 observations Chandra has been able to add 26 new black holes to the previous 9 identified in Andromeda. Just think about that for a second. 35 total black holes. Each one of those black holes was caused by a star that was 5-10 times the mass of our Sun and collapsed into a black hole. Let’s take a closer look at Andromeda in x-ray vision.     This Chandra image shows 28 of the 35 black holes in Andromeda. Just seven...

Strange Brown Dwarf as Hot as Your Oven!     Astronomers gain interesting insight on these failed stars or brown dwarf stars. Brown dwarf stars are essentially star like bodies that have a mass larger than a planet but too small to trigger nuclear fusion and ignite into a full fledged star. These stars are born with very little heat and can produce temperatures from 260 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (125 and 175 degrees Celsius). Their mass can be anywhere from 5 to 20 times the size of Jupiter. Scientists have even discovered a brown dwarf star so cold that even the human body temperature is warmer. However, since they are cold and small it prompts a difficult task to astronomers to accurately measure how dim, big, and far away these stars are. Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope scientists have been able to discover 8 brown dwarfs with precise distances. This helped them...