blue stragglers

"There is an ancient saying among men that you cannot thoroughly understand the life of mortals before the man has died, then only can you call it good or bad." -Sophocles Imagine looking up at the night sky -- able to survey the full depths of space -- with eyes the size of saucers instead of our paltry, few-millimeter-sized pupils. What do you suppose you'd see? Well, here on Messier Monday, we take a journey through the first catalogue to effectively do just that! Charles Messier catalogued, over many years in the late 18th Century, 110 deep-sky objects, each unique, and each telling its…

On the Blues and the Lifestyles and Fates of the Hottest Stars as they Cluster in the Heavens: or, why aging gracefully depends on your lifestyle and environment... The Stellar Dynamical Clock - is a Nature paper that came out in the Christmas double issue, always my favourite and very good value, might I add. This paper is from a long term collaboration lead by Prof. Francesco Ferraro which over many cycles has built up a systematic sample of Hubble Space Telescope images of Galactic Globular Clusters, focusing, in partiular, on the blue and UV emitters in the dense cores of clusters, but…

"The man's a born straggler... another lucky exception to the rules of natural selection. A million years ago he would've been an easy snack for a saber-toothed tiger." -Carl Hiaasen Welcome to the latest Messier Monday, where each week we take a look at one of Charles Messier's original catalogue of 110 deep-sky objects that comet-hunters might easily confuse with those transient passers-by in our Solar System. Image credit: Greg Scheckler, from his 2008 Messier marathon, where he nabbed 105/110. Quite to the contrary, each of the 110 objects in the Messier catalogue are (semi-)permanent…