Snowball of Stars Shines Through Clouds of Dust and Gas
For astronomers, space can be so cluttered that sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. A good example is the globular star cluster Terzan 12. Like all globular star clusters, it is a compact beehive of hundreds of thousands of stars crowded together. Picture it as snow globe. Now, shake the globe and that mimics the chaotic motion of stars inside a cluster. Globular clusters are the oldest inhabitants of our Milky Way. They contain aging stars and some of their burned-out stars are nearly as old as the universe itself. Despite their senility, globular clusters are on the go. They orbit above and below the pancake-flat stellar disk of our galaxy. They can also plunge right through the galactic plane. Identifying them is tricky because they are embedded among the billions of stars in the Milky Way’s disk. And to further complicate things there is a lot of dust in the galactic plane that filters and scatters light from Terzan 12. This makes the cluster appear redder than it normally would in Hubble's snapshots.
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