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Q13958
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open cluster in the constellation Cassiopeia
Q13958 is an open cluster—a group of stars held together by gravity—located in the constellation Cassiopeia in the night sky. Open clusters like this one help astronomers understand how stars form and evolve together, making them important objects for studying stellar physics and the history of our galaxy.
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Encyclopedic overview
Messier 52 or M52, also known as NGC 7654 or the Scorpion Cluster, is an open cluster of stars in the highly northern constellation of Cassiopeia. It was discovered by Charles Messier in 1774. It can be seen from Earth under a good night sky with binoculars. The brightness of the cluster is influenced by extinction, which is stronger in the southern half. Its metallicity is somewhat below that of the Sun, and is estimated to be [Fe/H] = −0.05 ± 0.01.
R. J. Trumpler classified the cluster appearance as II2r, indicating a rich cluster with little central concentration and a medium range in the brightness of the stars. This was later revised to I2r, denoting a dense core. The cluster has a core radius of 2.97 ± 0.46 ly (0.91 ± 0.14 pc) and a tidal radius of 42.7 ± 7.2 ly (13.1 ± 2.2 pc). It has an estimated age of 158.5 million years and a mass of 1,200 M☉.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Q13958” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.