NGC 4349 is an

open cluster An open cluster is a type of star cluster made of up to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud and have roughly the same age. More than 1,100 open clusters have been discovered within the Milky Way galaxy, and ...

in the constellation

Crux Crux () is a constellation of the southern sky that is centred on four bright stars in a cross-shaped asterism commonly known as the Southern Cross. It lies on the southern end of the Milky Way's visible band. The name ''Crux'' is Latin for c ...

. It was discovered by James Dunlop in 1826. It is located approximately 7,000

light year A light-year, alternatively spelled light year, is a large unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers (), or 5.88 trillion miles ().One trillion here is taken to be 1012 ...

s away from Earth.

Characteristics

There are 390 probable member stars within the angular radius of the cluster and 129 within the central part of the cluster. The tidal radius of the cluster is 17.8 - 22.8 parsecs (58 - 75 light years) and represents the average outer limit of NGC 4349, beyond which a star is unlikely to remain gravitationally bound to the cluster core. One blue straggler has been detected in the cluster. There are four Cepheid variables in the direction of the cluster, among them R and

T Crucis T Crucis is a star in the constellation Crux. A Cepheid variable, its apparent magnitude Apparent magnitude () is a measure of the brightness of a star or other astronomical object observed from Earth. An object's apparent magni ...

, which, however, are not members of the cluster. R Crucis lies 16 arcminutes from the centre of the open cluster NGC 4349, which is beyond the outer limit of the cluster, and is estimated to be nearly 1 kpc closer to Earth than the cluster. The cluster has subsolar

metallicity In astronomy, metallicity is the abundance of elements present in an object that are heavier than hydrogen and helium. Most of the normal physical matter in the Universe is either hydrogen or helium, and astronomers use the word ''"metals"'' as a ...

(−0.12 ± 0.06). A

brown dwarf Brown dwarfs (also called failed stars) are substellar objects that are not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen ( 1H) into helium in their cores, unlike a main-sequence star. Instead, they have a mass between the most ...

with minimum mass 19,8 times larger than that of

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but ...

has been detected orbiting star no. 127 (vmag. 10,88 and with mass 3.9 ) every 678 days. At the time of discovery, star NGC 4349 No. 127 was the heaviest star with an accurate mass determination around which a substellar companion had been detected, and also one of the youngest systems known.

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:NGC 4349 4349 Crux Open clusters