Sunny Priyan
The glittering, glitzy contents of the globular cluster NGC 6652 sparkle in this star-studded image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
The core of the cluster is suffused with the pale blue light of countless stars, and a handful of particularly bright foreground stars are adorned with crisscrossing diffraction spikes.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
NGC 6652 lies in our own Milky Way galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius, just under 30,000 light-years from Earth and only 6,500 light-years from the galactic center.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
Globular clusters are stable, tightly gravitationally bound clusters containing anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of stars.
Image Credit: Pixabay
The intense gravitational attraction between closely packed stars in globular clusters is what gives these star-studded objects their regular, spherical shape.
Image Credit: Meta AI
Two teams surveyed globular clusters like NGC 6652—one mapping galactic gravity, the other using Hubble’s filters to analyze carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.
Image Credit: Pixabay