ESA's Gaia telescope helps astronomers locate 1,179 new star clusters
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The European Space Agency's (ESA's) Gaia telescope, which has been operating since 2013, recently released its third major dataset.
Several teams of researchers have had time to pour over the details, and they've released a number of papers outlining their findings.
One new paper, from a team led by Guangzhou University, has cataloged more than 1,100 new star clusters in the Milky Way, a press statement reveals. The new findings dramatically increase the number of known star clusters in our region of the universe.
How many star clusters are there in the Milky Way
For years, there has been a discrepancy between the estimated number of star clusters in the Milky Way and the total that telescopes have observed. Roughly 15 years ago, scientists believed there may be as many as 100,000 star clusters in the Milky Way.
Observational evidence, however, hasn't backed that figure up so far. ESA's Gaia telescope, tasked with cataloging the roughly 1.7 billion stars in our galaxy, has so far found many of the approximately 7,000 star clusters discovered to date.
The new paper, published in the preprint server arXiv, outlines how the latest data release has uncovered 1,600 additional star clusters.
Using AI to help sift through Milky Way data
The researchers used an AI learning model to sift through the data. They specifically targeted latitudes above 20 degrees that previous researchers hadn't targeted.
They also looked as far as they could in the Gaia data to distances of about 5 kiloparsecs, or more than 16,000 light years. The team also decided to visually confirm each and every one of the 1,179 new star clusters.
The new research brings astronomers closer to confirming theories about the number of star clusters in the Milky Way. Though 16,000 light-years is a massive distance, it's a relatively small distance in the Milky Way, which spans about 100,000 light-years. That means those predictions about the high number of star clusters cannot be discounted yet.
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