Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
April 26, 1996
A Giant Globular Cluster in M31
Credit:
Michael Rich, Kenneth Mighell, and James D. Neill
(Columbia
University), and Wendy Freedman (Carnegie
Observatories),
Hubble Space Telescope, and
NASA
Explanation: G1, pictured above, is the brightest known globular cluster in the whole Local Group of galaxies. Also called Mayall II, it orbits the center of the largest nearby galaxy: M31. G1 contains over 300,000 stars and is almost as old as the entire universe. In fact, observations of this globular cluster show stars as old as the oldest of the roughly 250 known globular clusters in our own Milky Way Galaxy. This image was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in July of 1994. It shows, for the first time, the same fine detail in a distant globular cluster as can be discerned from a ground-based telescope of a globular cluster in our own Galaxy.
Authors & editors:
Robert Nemiroff
(GMU) &
Jerry
Bonnell (USRA).
NASA Technical Rep.:
Sherri
Calvo.
Specific rights apply.
A service of:
LHEA
at
NASA/
GSFC