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Coma Cluster: NGC 4874 From Hubble Legacy Archive

Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA Processing : Fabrizio Francione

The Coma Cluster (Abell 1656) is a large cluster of galaxies that contains over 1,000 identified galaxies.Along with the Leo Cluster (Abell 1367), it is one of the two major clusters comprising the Coma Supercluster.It is located in and takes its name from the constellation Coma Berenices.The cluster’s mean distance from Earth is 99 Mpc (321 million light years)

NGC4755: Jewel Box Star Cluster by Sam Frizza

NGC 4755: The Jewel Box Cluster

Distance: 6,440 light years

The Jewel Box is an open star cluster visible as a faint smudge with the naked eye under dark skies.

by Rolf Wahl Olsen

It is located 6,440 light years away towards the constellation Crux, The Southern Cross. The first person to recognise it as a cluster of individual stars was Nicolas Louis de Lacaille during his visit to Cape Town in 1752. The name of the cluster originates from John Herschel’s later observations in the 1830’s, also from Cape Town, and his resulting description of it:

“A most vivid and beautiful cluster, though neither a large nor a rich one, is yet an extremely brilliant and beautiful object when viewed through an instrument of sufficient aperture to show distinctly the very different colour of its constituent stars, which give it the effect of a superb piece of fancy jewellery”

The bright orange star in the centre of the cluster is known as Kappa Crucis. It provides a striking contrast with the rest of the hot blue cluster members. Although the cluster is a mere 14 million years young this star has already reached the red giant phase of its life and will most likely explode in a brilliant sumpernova within the next few million years.

The cluster has been photographed by a wide array of professional telescopes, including ESO’s VLT and La Silla observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope. Click on the following link to view a beautiful composite image that provides a zoom into the heart of the cluster: Putting the Jewel Box in Perspective

NGC 6362: Stars Ancient and Modern?

This colourful view of the globular star cluster NGC 6362 was captured by the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

This new picture, along with a new image of the central region from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, provide the best view of this little-known cluster ever obtained. Globular clusters are mainly composed of tens of thousands of very ancient stars, but they also contain some stars that look suspiciously young.

Globular star clusters are among the oldest objects in the Universe, and NGC 6362 cannot hide its age in this picture. The many yellowish stars in the cluster have already run through much of their lives and become red giant stars. But globular clusters are not static relics from the past — some curious stellar activities are still going on in these dense star cities.

Record-Breaking Galaxy Cluster May Be Most Massive Ever

Image: Artist’s impression of the galaxy at the center of the Phoenix Cluster, which is forming about 740 new stars per year. Image released August 15, 2012. Credit:NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

An extraordinary cluster of faraway galaxies is shattering or challenging a number of cosmic records, weighing in as potentially the most massive cluster known.

The colossal galaxy cluster is also the brightest in X-ray light, and the galaxy at its heart apparently gives birth to more than 700 stars per year – hundreds of times as fast as our Milky Way forms stars, researchers say.

The cluster of galaxies, located about 7 billion light-years away, is formally known by the alphabet-soup name of SPT-CLJ2344-4243. Astronomers also have given it a more informal moniker: the Phoenix cluster, named after the constellation in which it resides. It appears to contain thousands of galaxies with a range of sizes, from dwarf galaxies to conglomerations of stars about the size of the Milky Way.

Lonely Galactic Island

In terms of intergalactic real estate, our Solar System has a plumb location as part of a big, spiral galaxy, the Milky Way.

Numerous, less glamorous dwarf galaxies, keep the Milky Way company. Many galaxies, however, are comparatively isolated, without close neighbours. One such example is the small galaxy known as DDO 190, snapped here in a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

DDO 190 is classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy as it is relatively small and lacks clear structure. Older, reddish stars mostly populate DDO 190’s outskirts, while some younger, bluish stars gleam in DDO 190’s more crowded interior. Some pockets of ionised gas heated up by stars appear here and there, with the most noticeable one shining towards the bottom of DDO 190 in this picture. Meanwhile, a great number of distant galaxies with evident spiral, elliptical and less-defined shapes glow in the background.

M10: Globular Cluster

Messier 10 (M10) is a ball of stars that lies about 15 000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Bearer).

Approximately 80 light-years across, it should therefore appear about two thirds the size of the Moon in the night sky. However, its outer regions are extremely diffuse, and even the comparatively bright core is too dim to see with the naked eye.

Hubble, which has no problems seeing faint objects, has observed the brightest part of the centre of the cluster in this image, a region which is about 13 light-years across.

Omega Centauri

by Tunc Tezel

In a single-exposure telephoto image, Omega Centauri, a globular cluster of several million stars and the largest of its own in our galaxy soars above a dark forest in Turkey.

Rainbow Star Cluster Sparkles in Stunning Hubble Photo

The globular cluster Messier 9 shines in this new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA & ESA

Hundreds of thousands of glittering stars shine in a cluster at the center of our galaxy in a new photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The cluster is called Messier 9, and contains hordes of stars swarming in a spherical cloud about 25,000 light-years from Earth. The object is too faint to be seen with the naked eye, and when it was discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1764, the scientist could only resolve it as a faint smudge that he classified as a nebula (“cloud” in Latin).

Now, though, the Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to make out more than 250,000 individual stars in Messier 9, in a new picture released today (March 16). The bluer points indicate hotter stars, while the redder stars are cooler.

Messier 9 is what’s known as a globular cluster, containing some of the oldest stars in the galaxy in a clump that is thought to have formed together when the universe was much younger. These stars, which are about twice as old as the sun, are made of different materials than our star. They tend to lack the sun’s heavier elements, such as oxygen, carbon and iron, which were only present in larger quantities when the universe was older.

At the Core of NGC 6752

Hyades & Pleiades

Copyright: Alson Wong

Abell 426, The Perseus Galaxy Cluster

Copyright 2011 Jerry Lodriguss

Binary Black Hole in 3C 75

What’s happening in the middle of this massive galaxy? There, two bright sources at the center of this composite x-ray (blue)/radio (pink) image are thought to be co-orbiting supermassive black holes powering the giant radio source 3C 75. Surrounded by multimillion degree x-ray emitting gas, and blasting out jets of relativistic particles the supermassive black holes are separated by 25,000 light-years. At the cores of two merging galaxies in the Abell 400 galaxy cluster they are some 300 million light-years away. Astronomers conclude that these two supermassive black holes are bound together by gravity in a binary system in part because the jets’ consistent swept back appearance is most likely due to their common motion as they speed through the hot cluster gas at 1200 kilometers per second. Such spectacular cosmic mergers are thought to be common in crowded galaxy cluster environments in the distant universe. In their final stages the mergers are expected to be intense sources of gravitational waves.

Credit: X-Ray: NASA / CXC / D. Hudson, T. Reiprich et al. (AIfA);

Radio: NRAO / VLA/ NRL

Star Cluster NGC 290

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured the most detailed images to date of the open star clusters NGC 265 and NGC 290 in the Small Magellanic Cloud — two sparkling sets of gemstones in the southern sky.

Image Credit: European Space Agency & NASA

Binary Black Hole in 3C 75

What’s happening in the middle of this massive galaxy? There, two bright sources at the center of this composite x-ray (blue)/radio (pink) image are thought to be co-orbiting supermassive black holes powering the giant radio source 3C 75. Surrounded by multimillion degree x-ray emitting gas, and blasting out jets of relativistic particles the supermassive black holes are separated by 25,000 light-years. At the cores of two merging galaxies in the Abell 400 galaxy cluster they are some 300 million light-years away. Astronomers conclude that these two supermassive black holes are bound together by gravity in a binary system in part because the jets’ consistent swept back appearance is most likely due to their common motion as they speed through the hot cluster gas at 1200 kilometers per second. Such spectacular cosmic mergers are thought to be common in crowded galaxy cluster environments in the distant universe. In their final stages the mergers are expected to be intense sources of gravitational waves.

Credit: X-Ray: NASA / CXC / D. Hudson, T. Reiprich et al. (AIfA);

Radio: NRAO / VLA/ NRL