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posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 30 2024, @07:41AM   Printer-friendly

Space photo of the week: A cosmic 'fossil' holding some of the oldest stars in the universe.

The Hubble Space Telescope zooms in on a dense ball of millions of stars within a galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. Its ancient origins raise big questions about how galaxies form and grow, [known as ] Globular cluster NGC 2005

It is 162,000 light-years away, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and visible in the constellation Dorado

This new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows an object with mysterious origins that's commonly seen in the Milky Way: a globular cluster, a densely packed and gravitationally bound group of tens of thousands or millions of stars. However, NGC 2005 is actually located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy close to the Milky Way, and can be easily seen at night from the Southern Hemisphere.

Globular clusters are thought to be billions of years old. About 150 are known to exist in the halo of the Milky Way. They orbit its center in the opposite direction as most other objects in our galaxy, providing evidence for a theory that they were captured while the Milky Way was merging with other galaxies, according to NASA. That's how astronomers think galaxies evolve and grow. Another clue is that globular clusters host some of the oldest stars in the universe.

NGC 2005 is the perfect test case because it exists outside the Milky Way but is close enough to be studied carefully. It's about 750 light-years from the heart of the LMC, the biggest of about 40 dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way. Many of these dwarf galaxies are thought to orbit the Milky Way, though recent data from the Gaia spacecraft suggest that many of them may just be passing by.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Ingar on Friday August 02 2024, @09:02AM

    by Ingar (801) on Friday August 02 2024, @09:02AM (#1366717) Homepage Journal

    When I just started doing astrophotography, I considered globular clusters to be somewhat dull objects. Compared to galaxies or exotic nebulae,
    they are after all, just balls of stars. Using the correct techniques though, you can resolve a lot more stars and get a lot more color in the image.
    Each cluster has its own peculiar details, subtle arrangements of bright stars, and strands of stars swooping around.
    I learned to appreciate these objects for what they are.

    The Hubble image is a nice example of colorful stars, although it doesn't show a lot of structure in the globular cluster itself. I assume this is because of
    NGC 2005's distant location in the LMC.

    --
    Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
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