The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia telescope, which has been in operation since 2013, recently released its third largest dataset. Several groups of researchers have had time to work out the details and have published a series of papers summarizing their findings.

A new paper by a team led by Guangzhou University has cataloged more than 1,100 new star clusters in the Milky Way. The new discoveries significantly increase the number of known star clusters in our region of the universe.

How many star clusters are in the Milky Way?

For many years there was a discrepancy between the estimated number of star clusters in the Milky Way and the total number observed by telescopes. About 15 years ago, scientists believed there could be up to 100,000 star clusters in the Milky Way.

However, observational data do not yet confirm this figure. Tasked with cataloging some 1.7 billion stars in our galaxy, ESA’s Gaia telescope has found most of the nearly 7,000 star clusters discovered so far. A new article published on the arXiv preprint server explains how the latest data release has revealed 1,600 additional star clusters.

Using artificial intelligence to examine Milky Way data

The researchers used an AI learning model to review the data. They specifically targeted latitudes above 20 degrees, which previous researchers hadn’t targeted.

They also looked as far away as they could, about 5 kiloparsecs, or more than 16,000 light-years, according to Gaia. The team also decided to visually confirm each of the 1,179 new star clusters.