Instituto de Física y Astronomía

August 12, 2014, Instituto Fisica y Astronomía:

The VISTA Telescope finds 96 star clusters groups hidden behind clouds of dust. Using data from the VISTA Infrared Survey Telescope from ESO´s Paranal Observatory, an international team has discovered 96 new open star clusters, hidden by the dust in the Milky Way. These small and weak objects were invisible in previous surveys but they could not escape the powerful infrared detectors of the largest survey telescope in the world, which can see through the dust. This is the first time so many weak and small star groups have been found in one go. These results come  only one year after the start of the Vista Variables in the Vía Láctea Program (VVV [1], one of  six public surveys to have been undertaken by the new telescope. The results will be published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics magazine. "This discovery highlights the potential of VISTA and the VVV study for finding star clusters, most specially those hidden by the dust in stellar formation regions in the disc of the Milky Way. VVV is much more profund than other surveys", comments Jura Borissova, PI of the study.

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