Us Earthlings inhabit a solar system on one of the great spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.
The legendary Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting Earth, peered inward and captured a vivid image of stars near the center of the Milky Way, a galaxy that’s some 100,000 light-years across (or about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers). NASA posted the image online on Friday.
What can we see? A “sparkling starfield,” writes NASA.
That dense group of stars is called a “globular cluster,” and that’s specifically “globular cluster ESO 520-21,” found near the center of the galaxy. A globular cluster is a “densely packed, roughly spherical collection of stars,” writes the European Space Agency.
Poetically, NASA calls them “snow-globe-shaped islands of several hundred thousand ancient stars.”
Credit: ESA / HUBBLE AND NASA / R. COHEN
Star clusters are common in the universe, and because they’re bright, they’re often observed and researched by astronomers.
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There are some 150 globular clusters in the Milky Way. As of 2018, NASA had discovered well over 22,000 globular clusters in our ever-expanding universe.
Source : Hubble looks deep into our Milky Way galaxy, captures this sparkling scene
