images

Star Cluster NGC 1805 in Dorado

by

ESA/NASA/Novapix

Reference

a-agb18-05001

Date

2020-09-11

This Hubble Space Telescope picture shows a tight grouping of thousands of stars located near the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. The striking difference in star colours is illustrated in this image, which combines two different types of light: blue stars, shining brightest in near-ultraviolet light, and red stars, illuminated in red and near-infrared. Space telescopes like Hubble can observe in the ultraviolet because they are positioned above Earth’s atmosphere, which absorbs most of this wavelength, making it inaccessible to ground-based facilities. This young globular cluster can be seen from the southern hemisphere, in the Dorado constellation. Usually, globular clusters contain stars which are born at the same time; however, NGC 1805 is unusual as it appears to host two different populations of stars with ages millions of years apart.