Hubble finds appearances can be deceptive: Looking at the stars in NGC 411
Saturday, January 26, 2013 - 10:00
in Astronomy & Space
Globular clusters are roughly spherical collections of extremely old stars, and around 150 of them are scattered around our galaxy. Hubble is one of the best telescopes for studying these, as its extremely high resolution lets astronomers see individual stars, even in the crowded core. The clusters all look very similar, and in Hubble's images it can be quite hard to tell them apart -- and they all look much like NGC 411. And yet appearances can be deceptive: NGC 411 is in fact not a globular cluster, and its stars are not old. It isn't even in the Milky Way.