NASA has released an absolutely outstanding photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of a colorful collection of stars in the constellation of Scorpius.
This image shows the globular cluster NGC 6496, which lies in the southern constellation of Scorpius, about 35,000 light-years away. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Judy Schmidt, www.geckzilla.com.
The subject of this Hubble image is NGC 6496, a metal-rich globular cluster located 35,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Scorpius.
The cluster was discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop.
It is extremely old, likely dating back to 10.5 billion years ago (our Sun, by comparison, is about 4.5 billion years old).
According to astronomers, NGC 6496 is home to heavy-metal stars of a celestial kind (astronomers refer to all the chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium as metals).
The stars in NGC 6496 are enriched with much higher proportions of metals than stars found in similar clusters.
A handful of these high-metallicity stars are also variable stars, meaning that their brightness fluctuates over time.
NGC 6496 hosts a selection of long-period variable stars and short-period eclipsing binaries, which dim when eclipsed by a stellar companion.
The nature of the variability of these stars can reveal important information about their mass, radius, luminosity, temperature, composition, and evolution, providing astronomers with measurements that would be difficult or even impossible to obtain through other methods.
This color image of NGC 6496 (hi-res version) was made from separate exposures taken in the visible, UV- and IR regions of the spectrum with both Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).
