This striking image shows the densely packed globular cluster
known as NGC 2210, which is situated in the Large Magellanic Cloud
(LMC). The LMC lies about 157 000 light-years from Earth, and is a
so-called satellite galaxy
of the Milky Way, meaning that the two galaxies are gravitationally
bound. Globular clusters are very stable, tightly bound clusters of
thousands or even millions of stars. Their stability means that they can
last a long time, and therefore globular clusters are often studied in
order to investigate potentially very old stellar populations.
In fact, 2017 research that made use of some of the data that were
also used to build this image revealed that a sample of LMC globular
clusters were incredibly close in age to some of the oldest stellar
clusters found in the Milky Way’s halo. They found that NGC 2210
specifically probably clocks in at around 11.6 billion years of age.
Even though this is only a couple of billion years younger than the
Universe itself, it made NGC 2210 by far the youngest globular cluster
in their sample. All other LMC globular clusters studied in the same
work were found to be even older, with four of them over 13 billion
years old. This is interesting, because it tells astronomers that the
oldest globular clusters in the LMC formed contemporaneously with the
oldest clusters in the Milky Way, even though the two galaxies formed
independently.
LinksAs 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 centre: the sky would appear to be stuffed full of stars, in a stellar environment that is thousands of times more crowded than our own.
Source: ESA/Hubble/News
