Amazing photo shows 'swarm' of stars (+video)
Tens of thousands of stars can be seen clustered together in a new image.
Credit:
ESO and Digitized Sky Survey 2/J. Emerson/VISTA/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org) Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit Music: Compass by Disasterpeace (www.disasterpeace.com)
A ball of some of the oldest stars in the universe looks like a swarm of bees in a new view from an observatory in Chile.
The photo, released today (May 9), was taken by a European Southern Observatory telescope and shows 100,000 stars crowded together in Messier 55, a globular star cluster located roughly 17,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius (The Archer). It is one of about 160 globular clusters orbiting the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy.
Scientists suspect the stars in globular clusters formed from single clouds of gas that condensed to make stars around the same time, around 10 billion years ago. That makes these stars some of the most ancient known. As such, they provide valuable archaeological evidence about what the universe was like not long after the Big Bang is thought to have given rise to it.
"As this formative period was just a few billion years after the Big Bang, nearly all of the gas on hand was the simplest, lightest and most common in the cosmos: hydrogen, along with some helium and much smaller amounts of heavier chemical elements such as oxygen and nitrogen," scientists with the European Southern Observatory wrote in a statement.
