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Hubble may be nearing the end of his life, but he is still able to achieve truly incredible feats. A new image assembled from several Hubble snapshots has given astronomers a breathtaking glimpse of a distant collection of galaxies called the Coma group, and there are many things happening here.
The cluster, says NASA, is made up of more than 1,000 galaxies. This is not the number of stars or planets, but 1000 galaxies. Yeah, it's huge, and even if it's about 300 million light-years away from Earth, Hubble's observations have revealed tens of thousands of ancient star clusters that filled the space between galaxies neighbors.
In a new message, NASA explains that Hubble's high resolution is sufficient to allow researchers to identify 22,426 star groups scattered in the larger Coma group. NASA calls these "the first homesteaders of the universe" and says that they appear as "snow globe shaped islands of several hundred thousand ancient stars".
Astronomer Juan Madrid of Australia's Australian Telescope National Facility, and his team, worked on the mosaic construction of many of Hubble's images to paint a more detailed picture of the cluster. The group developed computer algorithms to combine the Hubble images archive of the cluster, and then compared them with other snapshots from various observation campaigns.
The end result is this incredibly detailed overview of a collection of galaxies and star clusters that you will never see at the naked eye. I strongly recommend that you view the image in full size to fully appreciate the insane number of objects on the screen.
It's a bit crazy to think, but Hubble was launched in 1990 and has been in service for almost 29 years already. It's an incredibly powerful piece of equipment and, even if it's had a few failures in recent months, it's still one of NASA's best tools for studying the depths of space.
Image Source: NASA, ESA, J. Mack (STScI) and J. Madrid (Australian Telescope National Facility)
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