The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured this vivid image of the star cluster NGC 339.
This Hubble image shows the massive star cluster NGC 339. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Judy Schmidt, www.geckzilla.com.
NGC 339, also known as Kron 36 and ESO 29-25, is a massive star cluster in the southern constellation of Tucana.
It is part of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that lies around 200,000 light-years away from us.
By measuring the brightnesses and colors of the stars of NGC 339, astronomers were able to estimate the age of the cluster – a method that places it at around 6.5 billion years old.
This makes NGC 339 only half the age of the more common globular clusters.
The relationship between massive intermediate age star clusters, such as NGC 339, and the true globular clusters are not fully understood yet.
So far none of these type of clusters has been found in our own Galaxy.
In this very detailed image, it is also possible to see a number of galaxies.
They appear as fuzzy, extended blobs, contrasting with the sharp stars that make up NGC 339.
Most obvious here are two elliptical galaxies, one towards the top left of the image and another in the centre right.
These galaxies are not associated with NGC 339 but lie far in the background, across the vast expanse of the cosmos.
This image of NGC 339 is composed of near-infrared and optical observations from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).
It is based on data obtained through two filters: a near-infrared (F814W) filter and a green (F555W) filter.
