It’s starting to look loads like Christmas on this NASA/ESA Hubble House 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, situated 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 comprises 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 capable of resolve the celebs 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 shiny giants which might be within the remaining phases of their lives. A lot of the blue stars sprinkled all through the cluster are getting 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/
