Using the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), astronomers were able to identify two more globular star clusters within our galaxy, the Milky Way. The discovery raises the total number of such structures to 159. One of the newly-found structures is very interesting because it is not located at the galactic center. This means that the light it emitted had to travel through massive clouds of dust and hydrogen gas in order to reach the Paranal Observatory-based telescope.
The South American installation is operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The UKS 1 cluster dominates the right side of the image, depicted in infrared wavelengths. The left-hand side of the image depicts the smaller cluster VVV CL001.
“These VISTA pictures were created from images taken though near-infrared filters J (shown in blue), H (shown in green), and Ks (shown in red). The size of the images show only a small fraction of the full VISTA field of view,” an ESO
press release reports.
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