NGC 637 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 ...

of stars in the northern

constellation A constellation is an area on the celestial sphere in which a group of visible stars forms Asterism (astronomy), a perceived pattern or outline, typically representing an animal, mythological subject, or inanimate object. The origins of the e ...

of Cassiopeia, positioned about 1.5° to the WNW of the star

Epsilon Cassiopeiae Epsilon Cassiopeiae or ε Cassiopeiae, officially named Segin (), is a single star in the northern constellation of Cassiopeia. With an apparent visual magnitude of 3.4, this is one of the brightest stars in the constellation. The dis ...

. The cluster was discovered on 9 November 1787 by German-born English astronomer

William Herschel Frederick William Herschel (; german: Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel; 15 November 1738 – 25 August 1822) was a German-born British astronomer and composer. He frequently collaborated with his younger sister and fellow astronomer Caroline H ...

. It is located in the

Perseus Arm The Perseus Arm is one of two major spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. The second major arm is called the Scutum–Centaurus Arm. The Perseus Arm begins from the distal end of the long Milky Way central bar. Previously thought to be 13,000 lig ...

of the

Milky Way The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye ...

, at a distance of approximately from the

Sun The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radi ...

. The cluster is small but compact, and is readily visible in a small telescope. This is a young cluster with an estimated age of 5–15 million years. It has a

Trumpler class 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, a ...

of I2m, indicating it is strongly concentrated (I) with an intermediate range of brightness variation (2) and a moderate richness of stars (m). The cluster has 55 members and an

angular radius The angular diameter, angular size, apparent diameter, or apparent size is an angular distance describing how large a sphere or circle appears from a given point of view. In the vision sciences, it is called the visual angle, and in optics, it is ...

of 4′.2, corresponding to a physical radius of . It has a

core radius A globular cluster is a spheroidal conglomeration of stars. Globular clusters are bound together by gravity, with a higher concentration of stars towards their centers. They can contain anywhere from tens of thousands to many millions of membe ...

of . The seven brightest members are all over 10th magnitude, with five known to be variable. A total of four β Cephei-type variables have been identified, one of the highest such totals for an open cluster. A classical

Be star Be stars are a heterogeneous set of stars with B spectral types and emission lines. A narrower definition, sometimes referred to as ''classical Be stars'', is a non-supergiant B star whose spectrum has, or had at some time, one or more Balmer e ...

candidate has been detected. The distribution of the cluster's stars on the

Hertzsprung–Russell diagram The Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, abbreviated as H–R diagram, HR diagram or HRD, is a scatter plot of stars showing the relationship between the stars' absolute magnitudes or luminosity, luminosities versus their stellar classifications or eff ...

shows a noticeable gap on the

main sequence In astronomy, the main sequence is a continuous and distinctive band of stars that appears on plots of stellar color versus brightness. These color-magnitude plots are known as Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams after their co-developers, Ejnar Her ...

, which is not explained by missing data.

References

External links

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SEDS
{{DEFAULTSORT:NGC 0637 Open clusters 0637 Cassiopeia (constellation) Discoveries by William Herschel Astronomical objects discovered in 1787