"So far, five open clusters have been investigated near us, including four by us," she says. She developed a method that allowed her to accurately count the stars in the tails for the first time. The co-author of the paper, who did her doctorate in Kroupa's group, recently moved from the European Space Agency (ESA) to the European Southern Observatory in Garching.
"To do this, you have to look at the velocity, direction of motion and age of each of these objects," explains Dr. Until now, it has been almost impossible to determine from among the millions of stars close to a cluster those that belong to its tails. However, in our work we were able to prove for the first time that this is not true: In the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars nearby to the cluster than the rear tail." "So both tails should contain about the same number of stars. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics. "According to Newton's laws of gravity, it's a matter of chance in which of the tails a lost star ends up," explains Dr. The other, in contrast, takes the lead like a spearhead. In the process, they regularly lose stars, which accumulate in two so-called "tidal tails." One of these tails is pulled behind the cluster as it travels through space. Pavel Kroupa of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. "In most cases, open star clusters survive only a few hundred million years before they dissolve," explains Prof.
The weak gravitational forces acting between them hold the cluster together. This creates a loose formation of several dozen to several thousand stars. In the process, the cluster expands considerably. As they "ignite," the galactic newcomers blow away the remnants of the gas cloud. These are formed when thousands of stars are born within a short time in a huge gas cloud. In their work, the researchers investigated open star clusters.
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