14 DAY TRIAL // Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, packs well over 200 billion stars. Even so, it's not exactly what some would call a crowded place. Au contraire, the majority of these stars are far enough from one another that it seldom happens that they get close enough to collide.
Then again, this does not mean that such cosmic crashes never happen. Thus, there are regions in the Milky Way where stars sit so close to each other that collisions are pretty much unavoidable.
One such region was recently discovered by researcher Francesco R. Ferraro of Italy's University of Bologna and his colleagues with the help of the Gemini Observatory. The previously unknown star cluster is described in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal.
It wasn't easy catching a glimpse of this star cluster
The newly discovered star cluster, called Liller 1 and shown in the image accompanying this article, is located deep within our galaxy's core. Specifically, astronomers estimate that it sits at a distance of about 3,200 light-years from the Milky Way's center.
In case anyone was wondering, this means that the distance from this tightly packed sphere of stars to our planet is one of about 30,000 light-years.
Although the star cluster is hidden from view by massive amounts of cosmic dust and so astronomers can't have a close look at its anatomy, data delivered by the Gemini Observatory indicates that it has a population of about 1.5 million stars.
This makes it similar in size to Omega Centauri and Terzan 5, two of the most massive agglomerations of stars thus far documented in our galaxy.
“The unprecedented ultra-sharp view of the cluster reveals a vast city of stars estimated by the team to contain a total mass of at least 1.5 million suns, very similar to the most massive globular clusters in our galaxy,” astronomers explain.
Stars are probably forever crashing inside this cluster
Being as densely packed as it is, it's safe to assume that Liller 1 has witnessed many stellar collisions over the ages and will continue to witness many more in the millennia to come.
As explained by astronomers, the cluster simply packs too many stars to think that all these fiery celestial bodies can simply dance and prance around one another without ever crashing.
“Our observations confirmed that, among globular clusters, Liller 1 is one of the best environments in our galaxy for stellar collisions,” says Douglas Geisler of the University of Conception in Chile.