A place were I can write...
My simple blog of pictures of travel, friends, activities and the Universe we live in as we go slowly around the Sun.
June 09, 2014
Jewel box
Jewels don't shine this bright -- only stars do. Like gems in a jewel box,
though, the stars of open
cluster NGC 290 glitter in a beautiful display
of brightness and color. The photogenic cluster, pictured
above, was captured recently by the orbiting Hubble
Space Telescope. Open clusters of stars are younger, contain few stars, and
contain a much higher fraction of blue stars than do globular clusters of stars. NGC 290 lies about
200,000 light-years
distant in a neighboring galaxy called the Small Cloud
of Magellan (SMC). The open cluster contains
hundreds of stars and spans about 65 light years across. NGC 290 and other open
clusters are good laboratories for studying how stars of different masses
evolve, since all the open cluster's stars were born at about the same time.
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