Hubble photographs incredible cluster of twinkling stars
Located on the outskirts of galaxies, “swarms of stars” are huge cosmic objects that come together, attracted by the gravitational force of the stars that compose them.
How many stars do you think there are in the vastness of space ? Many certainly. But at this point really? According to the latest estimates by astronomers, our universe contains about 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars . You do not know how to read such a number? It's quite normal. Do we help you? That 's 200 trillion stars .
According to astronomer Brian Jackson, a researcher at the State University of Boise in the United States, this gargantuan sum corresponds to 10 times the number of glasses of water in all the oceans of the Earth. That's a lot, isn't it?
The star cluster photographed by Hubble
Despite this comparison, we admit that all this is still very abstract, complicated to imagine such a quantity of stars. To help us, our dear Hubble took a picture of a huge cluster of stars located 28,000 light-years from our Solar System.
Called NGC 6440, this “cluster of twinkling stars” is located in the constellation of Sagittarius . This cosmic phenomenon, which may contain hundreds of thousands of stars, occurs on the outskirts of galaxies.
A pulsar observation program
On average, the stars that make up this type of cluster are one light-year away from each other. This gives us an idea of the considerable scale at which the photograph taken by Hubble was taken.
Also called "globular cluster" NGC 6440 was discovered in the 18th century by the German-British astronomer William Herschel. According to the astronomers in charge of the observations carried out by the Hubble Space Telescope:
"The data used to create this image comes from five different Hubble observing programs, four of which have focused on the properties of pulsars."
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