2023-08-15 06:31:59
The Hubble Space Telescope, jointly operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, has captured a galaxy located 6,500 light-years from the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The image reveals a globular star cluster (or closed star cluster), studded with stars, called NGC 6652, and is believed to be 13.6 billion years old. According to a 2020 study published in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the globular star cluster NGC 6652 is one of the oldest objects in the Milky Way. Globular clusters are dense assemblies of tens of thousands to millions of ancient stars, between 10 billion and 13 billion years old. (For comparison, the universe itself is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old.) It is believed that each galaxy has a group of spherical star clusters, and our Milky Way hosts about 150 of these clusters in the galactic halo that have been found so far. There are probably a few more hidden behind the galactic disk. Studying globular clusters can help astronomers probe the early stages of the galaxy and the wider universe. Globular star clusters may have evolved a few hundred million years after the Big Bang around massive stars that only existed for a few million years, according to a study published last May in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. NGC 6652 is located in the constellation Sagittarius (or Sagittarius), just under 30,000 light-years from Earth. The Hubble image of NGC 6652 shows countless faint blue stars, with red stars in the foreground. Like all globular clusters, the stars of NGC 6652 are tightly packed into a globular core due to intense gravity. The stunning new image is the result of two teams of scientists combining data using separate cameras on Hubble: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3. One team was looking at the age of globular clusters in the Milky Way, while the other team was trying to measure the amount of carbon. and nitrogen and oxygen in globular clusters like NGC 6652, to better understand the formation of the stars there. Quoting Russia today, the Hubble telescope captures one of the oldest objects in our galaxy. Previous Next You can share the news on the communication pages
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