NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope used its Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 to view the scattered stars of globular cluster NGC 6355, which is located less than 50,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. This massive globular cluster is actually nestled in our Milky Way galaxy’s inner regions.
What are globular clusters? They are essentially stable, tightly bound groups of tens of thousands to millions of stars associated with many different types of galaxies. Their dense populations of stars and mutual gravitational attraction are what gives it the roughly spherical shape holding a bright, central concentration of stars that are surrounded by an increasingly sparse scattering of stars.
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Hubble has revolutionized the study of globular clusters. It is almost impossible to distinguish individual stars in globular clusters with ground-based telescopes. Hubble’s unique capabilities and vantage point above Earth’s light-distorting atmosphere allow it to capture a globular cluster’s constituent stars in detail,” said NASA.
