Photo credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Sarajedini, F. Niederhofer
NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured this dazzling image of globular cluster NGC 2210 located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) around 157,000 light-years from Earth. What stands out first is the dense cluster of stars, with the brightest and most crowded ones in the center, where they are mostly a cool white color.
As you move towards the edges of NGC 2210, the stars become more spread out and reddish until a noticeable ‘edge’ to the cluster is reached. If you look beyond the edge, there are still many stars, more disorganized and seen on a black background. The LMC is actually a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, which means they are gravitationally bound. Since globular clusters like NGC 2210 are very stable and tightly bound, they can last a long time. This means globular clusters are often studied by astronomers in order to investigate potentially very old stellar populations.
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As well as being a source of interesting research, this old-but-relatively-young cluster is also extremely beautiful, with its highly concentrated population of stars. The night sky would look very different from the perspective of an inhabitant of a planet orbiting one of the stars in a globular cluster’s center: the sky would appear to be stuffed full of stars, in a stellar environment that is thousands of times more crowded than our own,” said the ESA.
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