It’s starting to look lots like Christmas on this NASA/ESA Hubble Area Telescope picture of a blizzard of stars, which resembles a swirling storm in a snow globe.
These stars make up the globular cluster Messier 79, positioned about 40 000 light-years from Earth within the constellation of Lepus (The Hare). Globular clusters are gravitationally certain groupings of as much as a million stars. These big “star globes” comprise among the oldest stars in our galaxy. Messier 79 isn’t any exception; it incorporates about 150 000 stars, packed into an space measuring simply roughly 120 light-years throughout.
This 11.7-billion-year-old star cluster was first found by French astronomer Pierre Méchain in 1780. Méchain reported the discovering to his colleague Charles Messier, who included it in his catalogue of non-cometary objects: The Messier catalogue. About 4 years later, utilizing a bigger telescope than Messier’s, William Herschel was in a position to resolve the celebrities in Messier 79 and described it as a “globular star cluster.”
On this glowing Hubble picture, Solar-like stars seem yellow-white and the reddish stars are vibrant giants which can be within the last phases of their lives. Many of the blue stars sprinkled all through the cluster are growing older “helium-burning” stars, which have exhausted their hydrogen gasoline and at the moment are fusing helium of their cores.
Picture Credit score: NASA and ESA, S. Djorgovski (Caltech) and F. Ferraro (College of Bologna)
Clarification from: https://www.spacetelescope.org/photographs/potw1751a/
