By ESA/Hubble
January 2, 2023
Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 6355, globular cluster that lies less than 50,000 light-years from Earth. Credit: ESA/Hubble & & NASA, E. Noyola, R. Cohen
The spread stars of the globular cluster NGC 6355 are scattered across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This globular cluster lies less than 50,000 light-years from Earth in the Ophiuchus constellation. NGC 6355 is a stellar globular cluster that lives in our Milky Way galaxys inner areas.
Globular clusters are steady, securely bound clusters of 10s of thousands to countless stars, and can be discovered in all kinds of galaxy. Their dense populations of stars and shared gravitational attraction give these clusters an approximately spherical shape, with a bright concentration of stars surrounded by a significantly sporadic sprinkling of stars. The thick, brilliant core of NGC 6355 was selected in crystal-clear detail by Hubble in this image, and is the crowded location of stars towards the center of this image..
With its viewpoint above the distortions of the atmosphere, Hubble has actually reinvented the research study of globular clusters. It is practically difficult to distinguish the stars in globular clusters from one another with ground-based telescopes, but astronomers have actually had the ability to use Hubble to study the constituent stars of globular clusters in detail. This Hubble image of NGC 6355 consists of data from both the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).