Thousands of colored stars are grouped together in this image of the globular cluster NGC 1805, near the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, captured by the Hubble telescope.
The stars orbit close to each other, like bees swarming around a hive. In the dense center of one of these clusters, the stars are between 100 and 1,000 times closer together than the stars closest to our Sun, so the planetary systems around them are unlikely.
The striking difference in the colors of the stars shown in this picture, different blends types of light: blue stars, which shine in nearly ultraviolet light, and red stars, illuminated in red and near-infrared, explains the NASA in a statement.
Space telescopes like Hubble can observe in the ultraviolet because they are positioned above the Earth’s atmosphere, which absorbs most of the ultraviolet light, making it inaccessible to installations on the ground.
This young globular cluster can be seen from the southern hemisphere, in the constellation Dorado, which in Portuguese means dolphin fish.
Globular clusters generally contain stars that are born at the same time. NGC 1805, however, is unusual in that it appears to host two different populations of stars with ages of millions of years. Observing these star clusters can help astronomers understand how stars evolve and what factors determine whether they end their lives as white dwarfs or explode as supernovae.