NASA and ESA have released a new Hubble Space Telescope image of Messier 30, a dense ball of stars about 27,500 light-years away in the constellation Capricornus, NASA reports. The cluster is thought to be between 11.5 and 13.5 billion years old, making it one of the oldest objects in our galaxy.
The image combines data from three Hubble programmes, spanning ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light. One of them tracked how groups of stars in the cluster moved over 15 years.
M30, like a number of other globular clusters, orbits the centre of the Milky Way in the opposite direction to the galaxy’s rotation. That suggests the Milky Way did not make these clusters itself but captured them long ago, perhaps from smaller galaxies it absorbed, helping astronomers piece together how our home galaxy grew.
Source: NASA