Hubble telescope captures stunning view of a dazzling globular cluster in Milky Way galaxy

The latest image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 6652, a globular cluster that lies in the constellation Sagittarius, just under 30 000 light-years from our home planet and only 6500 light-years from the Galactic centre.

In this glittery landscape, countless stars are merged into a bright core in the centre and a handful of particularly bright foreground stars are adorned with crisscrossing diffraction spikes.

This image, which combines data from two of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), is a result of two different observing programs carried out by two different teams. While the first team of astronomers focused on studying globular clusters in the Milky Way galaxy in the hope of shedding light on topics ranging from the ages of these objects to the gravitational potential of the galaxy as a whole, the second team used a trio of exquisitely sensitive filters in WFC3 to disentangle the proportions of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in globular clusters such as NGC 6652.

📸 This NASA/ESA @HUBBLE_space image shows globular cluster NGC 6652. The intense gravitational attraction between the closely packed stars is what gives these star-studded objects their regular, spherical shape 👉https://t.co/l1rPFYnQgz pic.twitter.com/rH7EIErdak

— ESA (@esa) July 31, 2023

For the unversed, globular clusters are stable, tightly gravitationally bound clusters containing anywhere between tens of thousands and millions of stars. The intense gravitational attraction between the closely packed stars in globular clusters is what gives these star-studded objects their regular, spherical shape.

Globular clusters have long been a subject of fascination for both amateur and professional astronomers. They provide a wealth of information about stellar evolution, galactic formation, chemical enrichment, and even the fundamental nature of the universe.