The Hubble telescope captured a globular star cluster in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way – News

A globular star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy

Hubble/ESA

The Hubble Space Telescope recorded a globular star cluster at a distance of about 162 thousand light years from Earth.

The image was released by the European Space Agency (ESA).

The globular cluster NGC 1841 came into the lens of the telescope. It is located in the dwarf galaxy of the Large Magellanic Cloud – a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

A globular star cluster is a cluster with a large number of stars and a clear symmetrical shape with an increasing concentration of stars towards the center.

“Most of the stars are very small and uniform in size, noticeably bluish and clustered closer to the center of the image. Some appear larger in the foreground. At the corners, the stars give way to a dark background.” – describes the ESA image.

Satellite galaxies are galaxies bound by gravity in orbits around a more massive parent galaxy.

Dozens of satellite galaxies revolve around the Milky Way, which are located much closer than the well-known Andromeda. The largest and brightest of them is the Big Dipper, which is easy to see with the naked eye from the southern hemisphere. However, light pollution makes this process increasingly difficult.

The Big Dipper is the “home” for many globular star clusters. They are located between scattered clusters, which are not so dense and interconnected, and compact galaxies.

Globular star clusters are diverse and complex. However, scientists still do not know how exactly they are formed.

Globular star clusters are stable, so they can exist for a long time, and therefore be very old. This is what makes them something like heavenly “fossils”.

It will be recalled that the Odyssey spacecraft, which is on its way to the Moon, sent the first photos from space.