Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
An international team of astrophysicists led by the Stellar Astrophysics Group of the University of Alicante (UA), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), and the University of Valparaíso (Chile) has discovered a massive cluster of stars of intermediate age in the direction of the Scutum constellation. This object, which has been named Valparaíso 1, lies some seven thousand light years away from the Sun, and contains at least fifteen thousand stars. To detect it, observations have been combined from ESA s Gaia satellite, and various ground-based telescopes, including the Isaac Newton Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands). The result has been published in
Chinese scientists use gigantic telescope to study solar wind
Xinhua
01 Jun 2021, 22:49 GMT+10
BEIJING, June 1 (Xinhua) With the help of the world s largest radio telescope, Chinese scientists have made progress on the observation of interplanetary scintillation, a phenomenon that can be used to study space weather. The radio signal from a distant compact radio source is scattered by the solar wind, and consequently, a random diffraction pattern is observed on Earth. This phenomenon is known as interplanetary scintillation (IPS) and ground-based IPS observations in turn can help infer the physical properties of the solar wind. Researchers from the National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences have made an analysis of the solar wind through IPS observations with China s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST).