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APOD
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
A Giant Globular Cluster in M31
Explanation: G1, pictured above, is the brightest known globular cluster in the whole Local Group of galaxies. Also called Mayall II, it orbits the center of the largest nearby galaxy: M31 . G1 contains over 300,000 stars and is almost as old as the entire universe . In fact, observations of this globular cluster show stars as old as the oldest of the roughly 250 known globular clusters in our own Milky Way Galaxy . This image was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in July of 1994. It shows, for the first time, the same fine detail in a distant globular cluster as can be discerned from a ground-based telescope of a globular cluster in our own Galaxy .
| Date | April 26, 1996 |
|---|---|
| Credit | Credit: Michael Rich, Kenneth Mighell, and James D. Neill (Columbia University), and Wendy Freedman (Carnegie Observatories), Hubble Space Telescope, and NASA |
| Authors & editors: | Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP) |
| A service of: |
ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U. |