Planets, galaxies, and countless stars may be found in space. And institutions like NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have occasionally provided us with magnificent sights, functioning as a bridge between people and the cosmos. NASA released a stunning image of a snow-globe-shaped island made up of hundreds of thousands of stars on Saturday. These stars are held together by gravity and form a globular cluster, which was imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. NASA stated in an Instagram post that the globular cluster was approximately 35,000 light-years distant from Earth in the constellation Scorpio.
“Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars bound together by gravity. They frequently include some of the oldest stars in their galaxies,” the space agency noted. It's intriguing to learn, though, that this cluster has been found and rediscovered over time and is known by a variety of names.
According to NASA, it was found in 1826 by James Dunlop, only to be rediscovered eight years later in 1834, and then again almost a century later in 1959.
“This cluster is now consistently recognized in widely available catalogs,” it stated.
Furthermore, NASA stated on its website that the very brilliant star at the top of the photograph was HD 159073, which is just around 4,000 light-years away from Earth. According to the space agency, this also made it a lot closer neighbor than NGC 6380.
NASA goes on to discuss the finding and subsequent rediscoveries of the NGC 6380 cluster. According to NASA, James Dunlop found the cluster in 1826. Then, in 1834, “John Herschel independently rediscovered it.” Paris Pismis "rediscovered" the cluster once more in 1959.
The cluster was taken by Hubble's Broad Field Camera 3, which has a wide field of view and can record a huge region of the sky. With that, NASA also reported that all of the Hubble Space Telescope's sensors were again functioning, and science data was being collected to further human understanding of the cosmos.
The orbiting observatory went black in mid-June, halting all astronomical observation, but it has since been repaired.
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