There’s a new paper out from the UW Massive Stars group! This one was a long time in the making but presents some really fascinating research by Dr. Debby Tran, a recent PhD grad from UW who worked with both Dr. Ben Williams and myself on some very cool work studying the young massive star population of NGC 6946. This is one of my absolute favorite galaxies since it’s hosted an astonishing ten supernovae (and other weird massive star events!) in the past 100 years, a huge number compared to all the other young star-forming galaxies that we’ve studied. To get to the bottom of this Dr. Tran studied the young stellar populations and stellar clusters in this galaxy for their PhD thesis work. Their previous work mapped star formation in this galaxy, and in this work they present a very cool computer vision algorithm for detecting candidate star clusters. The paper will be published in the Astrophysical Journal soon, and in the meantime you can check it out on arXiv!