Cluster up

It's a SMASH!

A star cluster is a group of hundreds to millions of stars that all form at basically the same time. And though the stars in a single cluster run the gamut when it comes to mass, they're all forged from the same material, meaning their compositions are nearly identical. This fixed variable of composition helps make star clusters incredibly useful to astronomers, as their ages can be dated with extreme precision.Once you know the ages of a bunch of star clusters that potentially formed during past interactions between the LMC and SMC, you can begin to disentangle the Magellanic Clouds' complicated interaction history. And that's exactly what astronomers hope to do, as it may help reveal clues about the Milky Way's own past.However, before astronomers can use the ages of star clusters to piece together our galactic neighborhood's complex past, they first need to actually discover the faint clusters. So, as part of the Local Group Cluster Search (an off-shoot of the larger Zooninverse citizen-scientist project), researchers are delegating this first step to anyone willing to pitch in.The Local Group Cluster Search relies on images obtained by a new investigation called the Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History (SMASH). The SMASH survey utilizes the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Blanco 4-m telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in northern Chile to image the Magellanic Couds — which is no small feat."The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are huge on the sky, covering more than 100 square degrees — an area larger than 500 Full Moons!" said head of the SMASH survey David Nidever, an astronomer at Montana State University, in a press release from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory . Although the Hubble Space Telescope would need to take tens of thousands of images to capture the full area of the Magellanic Clouds, the release says, DECam is able to do so in fewer than 50 images, thanks to its enormous field of view.