Pan: Cluster in the Cloud Globular Cluster NGC 2210 | Hubble

Pan: Cluster in the Cloud Globular Cluster NGC 2210 | Hubble

This striking image shows the densely packed globular cluster known as NGC 2210. It is situated in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC lies about 157,000 light-years from Earth. It is a so-called satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, meaning that the two galaxies are gravitationally bound. Globular clusters are very stable, tightly bound clusters of thousands or even millions of stars. Their stability means that they can last a long time, and therefore globular clusters are often studied in order to investigate potentially very old stellar populations. 

In fact, 2017 research that made use of this data used to build this image revealed that a sample of LMC globular clusters were incredibly close in age to the oldest stellar clusters found in the Milky Way’s halo. They found that NGC 2210 is around 11.6 billion years old. Although this is only a couple of billion years younger than the Universe itself, it makes NGC 2210 by far the youngest globular cluster in their sample. All other LMC globular clusters studied in the same work were found to be older, with four of them over 13 billion years old. This is interesting, because it tells astronomers that the oldest globular clusters in the LMC formed contemporaneously with the oldest clusters in the Milky Way, although the two galaxies formed independently. 

As well as being a source of interesting research, this old-but-relatively-young cluster is also extremely beautiful with its highly concentrated population of stars. The night sky would look very different from the perspective of an inhabitant of a planet orbiting one of the stars in a globular cluster’s center. The sky would appear to be stuffed full of stars, in a stellar environment that is thousands of times more crowded than our own.

Image Description: A dense cluster of stars. It is brightest and most crowded in the center, where the stars are mostly a cool white color. Moving out towards the edges the stars become more spread out and reddish until a noticeable ‘edge’ to the cluster is reached. Beyond that edge there are still many stars, more disorganized and seen on a black background. A number of stars appear to be in front of the cluster.

Science paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: 

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/471/3/3347/3930867

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Sarajedini, F. Niederhofer

Duration: 30 seconds

Release Date: Dec. 10, 2023

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