Hundreds of thousands of stars shine brightly in the new Hubble image

Behold a heavenly bounty from space. In a recent image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, the star cluster in globular cluster Terzan 12 shines through interstellar gas and dust, making the entire image glow with activity.

And the size of the globular cluster is about 15,000 light.years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. Globular clusters are collections of ancient stars that inhabit the region on either side of the disks of galaxies, including our own Milky Way. It can be difficult to distinguish groups amidst the busyness of space Sometimes it is shrouded in dust and gas. Such is the case with Terzan 12, but the globular cluster still looks amazing on camera.

The image above is a composite image, stitched together by multiple exposures taken by Hubble on August 8, 2016 and August 13, 2016. The images were taken using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3, and include some observations taken of a Hubble proposal It seeks to better understand the structure and ages of globular clusters towards the central bulge of the Milky Way.

The bright reddish-orange stars in the image are many times the mass of our Sun pretty average As far as the stars are concerned. The blue stars in the image are not actually present in the cluster; They are younger, and the cluster is a collection of much older celestial bodies.

Besides looking pretty and showing just how much stuff is out there in space, globular clusters have a few tricks up their sleeve. two years agoA team of researchers looking at globular cluster NGC 6397 found that a group of small, star-sized black holes lurk in the cluster. The cohesion of stars with their gravity.

This isn’t entirely surprising, as stellar-mass black holes form when an old star collapses in on itself, leaving the black hole’s void-like shadow in its wake. The Palomar 5 globular cluster, for example, is a 10-billion-year-old cluster of stars that contains about three times more black holes than would be expected based on the number of stars in the cluster. This team assumed that in about a billion years, Palomar 5 will be around It is completely dominated by black holes.

Terzan 12 has a brighter future, at least for the foreseeable future. (By the way, it is really the eleventh globular cluster discovered by the Turkish-Armenian astronomer Agup Tarzan because Terzan 5 has been counted twice. To avoid confusion, Terzan 12 was given this name, although Terzan 11 was lost.)

Because of their extraordinary age, globular clusters help astronomers understand the life cycles of stars and even Search for binary systems From old (and dead) stars, such as neutron stars and black holes. But for the casual viewer (and, in fact, the astronomer), it’s just an amazing sight to see.

More: Results from gravitational waves indicate that supermassive black holes are constantly distorting space-time