Astronomers reported the discovery of a previously unknown star cluster, designated Barbá 2. It contains at least several supergiant stars.
Barbá 2 was first discovered a decade ago by Chilean astronomer Rodolfo Barbá. He scanned the plane of the Milky Way with multi-wavelength surveys and looked for star clusters possibly associated with warm dust. As a result, he found a previously unknown cluster located at a distance of 24 thousand light years (this is almost comparable to the distance between the Earth and the center of our galaxy).
However, Rodolfo Barbá passed away in 2021 before he could publish an article about his find. Only now, a team of Spanish researchers has continued his work and presented the results of the new analysis, supplemented with data from the Gaia observatory. They confirmed the existence of the cluster.
The study shows that the radius of Barbá 2’s core is 2.74 light-years, and it is about 24,100 light-years away from Earth. Astronomers were able to identify 201 of the most likely members of the cluster, centered near its core.
The brightest star in Barbá 2 is a yellow supergiant. Besides it, six other supergiants have been detected in there: five red supergiants and one blue supergiant. In this way, Barbá 2 was classified as a supergiant-rich star cluster. In addition, the study has found that Barbá 2 neither shows strong internal motions, expands, nor includes a significant number of “escape” stars.
We previously told you how the Hubble telescope helped astronomers find an elusive medium-mass black hole at the center of a globular cluster.
According to Phys.org
