The Hubble Space Telescope’s newest image of Messier 72 (M72), shared for its 35th birthday celebration, is a beautiful look at a globular cluster in the Aquarius constellation, about 50,000 light-years from Earth.
It shows a tight, spherical group of old stars, with a bright core that blends into spread-out stars at the edges, kind of like a city skyline seen from above at night. This globular cluster, first spotted by French astronomer Pierre Méchain in August 1780 and catalogued by Charles Messier, contains stars packed much tighter at its center.
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What’s extra cool about this picture is the new ways they processed the data, making details stand out more than in older photos, like the one from 2010 when M72 was featured as Hubble’s first “Picture of the Week.” The photo was taken with the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys, using yellow and near-infrared filters (F606W and F814W), with about 10 minutes of exposure per filter.
The stars in M72 are thought to be around 10–12 billion years old, almost as old as the universe itself. They’re low in metals, giving us a peek into the early chemical evolution of our galaxy. That makes M72 really important for learning how the Milky Way came to be. That makes M72 really important for learning how the Milky Way came to be. Some experts think M72 might not have started in the Milky Way. Its path and features suggest it could have come from a smaller galaxy or be left over from a galaxy mash-up, but they’re still figuring that out.
