If this week’s release of James Webb’s largest image yet hasn’t quite satisfied your need for beautiful pictures of space, the old faithful Hubble Space Telescope is here for you. Every week Hubble researchers share an image collected by the 30-year-old telescope, and this week it shows a bright globular cluster called NCG 6540.
A globular cluster is a group of tens of thousands or even millions of stars, which are packed together and held together by common gravity. This particular globular cluster was imaged using two Hubble instruments, the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
This twinkling image shows the globular cluster NGC 6540 in the constellation Sagittarius, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys. The two instruments have slightly different fields of view — which determines how large an area of the sky each instrument captures. This composite image shows a starry region of the sky captured in the field of view of both instruments. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Cohen
This cluster is located about 17,000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius. It was first observed in 1784 by William Herschel, who initially classified it as a “faint nebula”, but its true nature as a globular cluster was noticed when it was observed by Celtech astronomer Stanislav George Djorgovski in 1986.
Studying these vast clusters of stars can help astronomers learn more about the evolution of stars and galaxies, and this image was collected as part of a study of globular clusters within the Milky Way. As Hubble scientists explain, “Hubble peered into the heart of NGC 6540 to help astronomers measure the age, shape and structure of globular clusters toward the center of the Milky Way. The gas and dust surrounding the center of our galaxy block some of the light from these clusters, as well as subtly alter the colors of their stars…Globular clusters contain insights into the earliest history of the Milky Way, so studying them can help astronomers understand how our galaxy evolved.”
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Source: newstars.edu.vn