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We Earthlings inhabit a solar system on one of the great spiral arms of the Milky Way.
The legendary Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting Earth, scanned the interior and captured a vivid image of stars near the center of the Milky Way, a galaxy about 100,000 light years in diameter (or about 1,000 000,000,000,000,000 kilometers). NASA released the image online Friday.
What can we see ? A “sparkling star field,” writes NASA.
This dense group of stars is called a “globular cluster”, and it is specifically “globular cluster ESO 520-21”, found near the center of the galaxy. A globular cluster is a “roughly spherical, dense collection of stars,” writes the European Space Agency.
Poetically, NASA calls them “snowball-shaped islands of several hundred thousand ancient stars.”
A “sparkling star field”.
Credit: ESA / HUBBLE ET NASA / R. COHEN
Star clusters are common in the universe, and because they are bright, they are often observed and studied by astronomers.
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There are some 150 globular clusters in the Milky Way. In 2018, NASA discovered more than 22,000 globular clusters in our ever-expanding universe.
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