Image of the Week – Hubble Spies A Glittering Jewel
30 Mar 2012, 10:35 UTC
The NASA\ESA Hubble Space Telescope has obtained the highest quality image of the globular cluster Messier 9 (M9) ever produced.
Messier 9 as seen by Hubble Credit: NASAESA
This glorious sphere of stars is far too faint to be detected by the human eye, yet Hubble can resolve it as upwards of a 1/4 of a million individual glistening stars.
M9 sits towards the centre of our own galaxy, and yet whilst relaivly close by in the grand scale of the universe it is still 25,000 light years from Earth.
The stars within M9 are twice the age of our own sun and are metal poor as a result – as they formed at a time when the cosmos was still largely deprived of the heavier elements like iron, oxygen and nickel.
The cluster was first discovered in 1764 by the French astronomer Charles Messier and was included as object 9 on his list of astronomical objects (hence its name!).
The image above covers and area of sky roughly equal to a pin head held at arms reach,a true testiment to the power of Hubble.
You can read more here
