US Edition
Astronomers Discover Binary Stars in Outer Regions of Ancient Star Cluster
The binary star frequency in 47 Tucanae’s outskirts is about three times higher than in its core, revealing new insights into globular cluster evolution, ANU researchers said.
- On Friday, astronomers from the Australian National University reported a world-first detection of binary stars in the outer regions of globular cluster 47 Tucanae using Data Preview 1 from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory linked to the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
- Binary stars drive key dynamical processes in clusters, exchanging energy with neighbors, influencing globular cluster survival over billions of years, and producing blue stragglers, aiding Milky Way evolution.
- Analysis focused on 1,308 main-sequence stars and 25 binaries with q>0.7 in 47 Tuc at ~4.5 kpc, 18–40 arcmin from the centre.
- `Even in its first test data, LSST is opening a new window,' Professor Helmut Jerjen said, supplying empirical input for binary formation tests.
- Strikingly, binaries are roughly three times more common in the cluster outskirts than in the dense central regions studied with the Hubble Space Telescope, supporting links to blue straggler stars and primordial binaries predicted by N-body simulations.
14 Articles
14 Articles
A JWST project on 47 Tucanae: Binaries among multiple populations
Almost all globular clusters (GCs) contain multiple stellar populations consisting of stars with varying helium and light-element abundances. These populations include first-population stars, which exhibit similar chemical compositions as halo-field stars with comparable [Fe/H], and second-population stars, characterized by higher helium and nitrogen abundances along with reduced levels of oxygen and carbon. Nowadays, one of the most intriguing …
The emergence of globular clusters and globular-cluster-like dwarfs
Globular clusters (GCs) are among the oldest and densest stellar systems in the Universe, yet how they form remains a mystery1. Here we present a suite of cosmological simulations in which both dark-matter-free GCs and dark-matter-rich dwarf galaxies naturally emerge in the Standard Cosmology. We show that these objects inhabit distinct locations in the size–luminosity plane and that they have similar ages, age spread, metallicity and metallicit…
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