Two Great Globular Clusters Seen by Hubble: Pismis 26 and Ruprecht 106

If you like shiny things, some of the most gorgeous objects in space are clusters of stars. Two different Hubble images of globular clusters were featured by NASA and the European Space Agency.

Unlike ground-based telescopes, the Hubble telescope can't distinguish the individual stars in a cluster because they are so dense. The role of gravity in dense systems has been studied using the Hubble Telescope.

The Pismis 26 star cluster is located about 23,000 light-years away and is the first image from Hubble. The Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico where Paris Pismis discovered the cluster in 1959 is now known as Tonantzintla 2.

Some of the oldest stars in the Universe are usually included in a globular cluster. Our resident astronomer called the clusters the "retirement homes for the galaxy."

The age of this particular cluster is estimated by Astronomers.

The stars in clusters are attracted to one another. Most of the time there are no more than a couple dozen parsecs in a gis. Each one has a lot of stars. The average distance between stars is about 1 light-year, but in their core the stars pack together over a thousand times more tightly than we do.

This is the second image of a cluster. The Advanced Camera for Surveys was installed on the space telescope by astronauts in 2002.

There is a bit of a mystery in Ruprecht106. Hubble has shown that it is not always true that most of the stars in a cluster formed at the same time. The groups of stars within the clusters have very different ages or compositions than the rest of the cluster.

There are a few globular clusters that do not have multiple populations of stars. Astronomers will use the James Webb Space Telescope to study the stars and their life cycles.