Cluster of Jewels

Credit: Euro­pean Space Agency & NASA

A clus­ter of jew­els, known as NGC 265, glows in the Small Mag­el­lanic Cloud.

Explore the most detailed image of the open star clus­ter taken by NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. Most of the stars in this clus­ter were born at about the same from the same neb­ula. Some clus­ters are tightly packed balls of stars called glob­u­lar clus­ters. The stars of NGC 265, how­ever, are held loosely together by grav­ity. The clus­ter spans 65 light-years. It takes a light beam, trav­el­ing 6 tril­lion miles a year, 65 years to zip from one side of the clus­ter to the other. Even­tu­ally, the stars will dis­perse, mov­ing far­ther and far­ther from their shared birth­place. The clus­ter is dom­i­nated by young and hot white stars. Zoom in closer on one of the red stars. These are red super­giants, des­tined to become super­novae one day, min­gle with the younger stars.

NGC 265 lies about 200,000 light-years from Earth in the Small Mag­el­lanic Cloud. The SMC is one of sev­eral irreg­u­lar dwarf galax­ies near our Milky Way Galaxy. It is one of our galaxy’s near­est neigh­bors. If you are deep in the south­ern hemi­sphere, it is one of the most dis­tant objects that can be seen with the naked eye.