Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

See a cluster of cosmic wild ducks in flight in Hubble’s picture of the week

Georgina Torbet
By
This star-studded image shows us a portion of Messier 11, an open star cluster in the southern constellation of Scutum (The Shield). ESA/Hubble & NASA, P. Dobbie et al.

The Hubble Space Telescope has provided us with another space picture for us to marvel at. The telescope has imaged the Messier 11 cluster, a group of stars in the southern constellation of Scutum (the Shield), and it has produced this wonderful image of stars sparkling in the night sky. The Messier 11 cluster is also known by another name: the Wild Duck Cluster, because the brightest stars (shown in the center of the image) look like a flock of ducks in flight.

Messier 11 is somewhat unusual as it is one of the few open clusters ever imaged by Hubble. Hubble usually images globular clusters, which are densely packed groups of stars which are drawn close together by gravity. An open cluster, by contrast, is only loosely held together by gravity.

Recommended Videos

While globular clusters can be very old, with the same group of thousands of stars moving together for millions of years, open clusters have a shorter lifespan. When stars in an open cluster pass by another strong source of gravity like a larger cluster or a black hole, they are easily drawn away from their cluster. This means that the cluster breaks up relatively quickly.

Related

This particular open cluster was discovered by the German astronomer Gottfried Kirch in 1681. It is composed of nearly 3000 stars and is located 6200 light-years from Earth. This makes it one of the richest and most compact open clusters currently known to science. It was imaged by Hubble in 2017, but this newer image was recently processed and chosen as Hubble’s picture of the week.

The Messier catalogue, a list of clusters, nebulae, and galaxies that can be seen in the night sky first compiled by astronomer Charles Messier in 1771 and still used by astronomers today, contains just 26 open clusters out of 110 astronomical objects. Of these 26 open clusters, Messier 11 is the most distant one that can be seen with the naked eye.

If you’re hoping to glimpse Messier 11 for yourself, then August is the best time to look to the skies.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Thousands of stars sparkle in this week’s Hubble image
This star-studded image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the heart of the globular cluster NGC 6638 in the constellation Sagittarius. The star-strewn observation highlights the density of stars at the heart of globular clusters, which are stable, tightly bound clusters of tens of thousands to millions of stars. To capture the data in this image, Hubble used two of its cutting-edge astronomical instruments: Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

A sky full of stars is on glorious display in this week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The image shows a structure called a globular cluster, which is an enormous collection of tens of thousands or even millions of stars, tightly bound by gravity and densely packed together.

This particular globular cluster is called NGC 6638 and is located in the constellation of Sagittarius. It was taken using two of Hubble's instruments, the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which operate primarily in the visible light wavelength.

Read more
Hubble captures a glittering, glorious globular cluster
The globular cluster Terzan 2 in the constellation Scorpio is featured in this observation from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Globular clusters are stable, tightly gravitationally bound clusters of tens of thousands to millions of stars found in a wide variety of galaxies. The intense gravitational attraction between the closely packed stars gives globular clusters a regular, spherical shape. As this image of Terzan 2 illustrates, the hearts of globular clusters are crowded with a multitude of glittering stars.

The James Webb Space Telescope might be getting all the news headlines this week, but the grand old dame of the space telescope world, the Hubble Space Telescope, continues to peer out into the cosmos and provide stunning views of space. At over 30 years old, Hubble remains one of the key instruments for examining cosmic objects in the visible light range and captures views of everything from distant galaxies to beautiful nebulae to planets in our solar system.

The image shared this week from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a globular cluster called Terzan 2, with a blanket of sparkling stars visible by the thousand over the blackness of the sky.

Read more
Hubble captures a glittering cluster of thousands of stars
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the sparkling globular cluster NGC 6569 in the constellation Sagittarius. Hubble explored the heart of this cluster with both its Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys, revealing a glittering hoard of stars in this astronomical treasure trove.

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a stunning field of stars called a globular cluster. Taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys instruments, the view captures the beautiful depths of the globular cluster NGC 6569, located in the constellation of Sagittarius.

"Globular clusters are stable, tightly bound clusters containing tens of thousands to millions of stars, and are associated with all types of galaxies," Hubble scientists explain. "The intense gravitational attraction of these closely packed clusters of stars means that globular clusters have a regular spherical shape with a densely populated center — as can be seen in the heart of this star-studded image."

Read more