An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describes the creation of a map of neutral atomic hydrogen in the Milky Way. An international team of scientists put together data collected by two of the largest steerable radio telescopes in the world, the 100-m Max-Planck radio telescope in Effelsberg, Germany and the 64-m CSIRO radio telescope in Parkes, Australia.
An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” describes the discovery of the relics of an ancient globular cluster in the Milky Way’s central area. A team of astronomers led by Dante Minniti (Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile) and Rodrigo Contreras Ramos (Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica, Santiago, Chile) used observations from the “Variables in the Via Lactea with VISTA” (VVV) survey carried out with ESO’s VISTA telescope to discover the ancient stars of type RR Lyrae for the first time in that area.
A series of articles to be published in “Astrophysical Journal” and “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describe different parts of a research based on the observation of the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) using the radio telescope ALMA. These observations show that the rate of star formation in young galaxies is closely related to their total mass in stars.
ESA has published the first 3D map of the Milky Way obtained from the Gaia space probe, the most detailed of its kind ever produced. It’s a catalog of more than a billion stars with data that are two hundred more accurate than those of its predecessor, Hipparcos, whose mission lasted between 1989 and 1993.
An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describes a research on the globular cluster Terzan 5. An international team of astronomers led by Francesco Ferraro from the University of Bologna discovered that the stars of Terzan 5 are divided into two groups, one with an age of 12 billion years and one with an age of around 4.5 billion years, more or less like the Sun. This unique feature can help to better understand the evolution of the Milky Way.
