Friday, October 15, 2010

APOD 1.7

October 9th, 2010.                Global Star Cluster NGC 6934

What an amazing picture this was! Even before looking through the rest of this week's pictures I knew that I would choose this image for my weekly post. This picture is of a globular star cluster, or a spherical collection of thousands of stars that orbit a galactic core and are bound by the force of gravity. There are two types of star clusters, globular and open. While open clusters only have up to a few hundred stars loosely packed, as we can see from the picture globular star clusters have up to millions of stars packed tightly together. Oddly enough, many of the stars seen are even older than the galactic disk that they orbit. NGC 6934 was discovered in 1785 and estimated to be about 50 kilo-light years. This core happens to lay in the center of Delphinus, the Dolphin constellation that we learned about which contains Job's coffin.  This picture was taken from the well known Hubble Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys and spans over 50 light years, focusing on stars estimated to be over 10 billion years old.

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