The starry sky is on display in gorgeous images from the Hubble Space Telescope this week. This image shows structures called globular clusters, huge collections of tens of thousands or even millions of stars tightly bound together by gravity and tightly packed together.
This particular globular cluster is called NGC 6638 and is located in the constellation Sagittarius. It was taken using two of Hubble’s instruments, the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which work primarily in visible wavelengths.
Before Hubble, these amazing objects were difficult to study because to be able to distinguish each star from the others required very high-resolution imaging with little or no interference . “Hubble revolutionized the study of globular clusters because it was nearly impossible to clearly distinguish stars in globular clusters with ground-based telescopes,” the Hubble scientists explained. “The blur caused by Earth’s atmosphere makes it impossible to distinguish one star from another, but from where Hubble is in low Earth orbit, the atmosphere no longer poses a problem. So Hubble is used to study what globular clusters are made of Such stellar compositions, how they evolve, and the role of gravity in these dense systems.” Globular clusters will soon also be studied using another tool, as a cluster called Messier 92 was created using James Webb The goal of the space telescope’s early science program. The project will study star-forming regions using Webb’s NIRCam and NIRISS instruments, which observe in the infrared range rather than Hubble’s primary visible-light observations. According to lead researcher Daniel Wiesz, who spoke with Inverse about the project, Messier 92 has some extremely old stars, and the team is developing special imaging software to resolve individual stars in dense regions.
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