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Since the dawn of nerdom, every nerd has known that there are two great escapes in life: whatever comes from the mind of JRR Tolkien and deep space. Plus some who engage both like Star wars, Star Trek, and much more. Now, to unleash your nerdy imagination, NASA has shared an image of a “rediscovered” star cluster 35,000 light years from Earth. Coincidentally, this is exactly the right distance to travel to forget about your troubles.
NASA / ESA
Mashable reported the image that NASA recently posted online to launch Hubble Deep field week. Space agencies used NASA’s Hubble Telescope to capture the globular cluster, NGC 6380. NASA engineers recently brought Hubble back online, which took the photo. However, it is not known exactly when the space telescope took the dynamic photo.
Despite its unromantic name – NGC means it is part of the New General Catalog, an astronomical catalog of deep space objects – NGC 6380 is brilliant beyond words. As NASA notes, NGC 6380 is a globular collection of stars held in their spherical shape by the force of gravity. And the result of the physical dance is a Jackson Pollock of sparkling dots; each their own flaming nuclear fusion reactor flying through space.
The image is a “wide field” view of NGC 6380. The wide field view means that it captures a relatively large area of the sky in enormous detail. The cluster itself is found in the constellation Scorpio (in the image below), which viewers can see in the Southern Hemisphere. It is located near the center of our galaxy, much closer to the axis of the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A *.
Note that the brightest ball of light in the image, the dazzling bluish white diamond in the upper left corner, is not part of NGC 6380. It is actually a singular star: HD 159073. And it is far, much closer to us Terrans, only 4000 light years away. Which is still quite far in space, one imagines, for a good escape.
ESO / B. Tafreshi
The NASA article shares a stunning image of the ‘rediscovered’ star cluster that first appeared on Nerdist.
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