Hubble Spies Stellar Sparkler NGC 6426

Red, white, and blue stars glitter like a sparkler being waved on a dark night in this image of globular cluster NGC 6426. Located in the outer halo of our Milky Way galaxy, globular cluster NGC 6426 is a spherical collection of stars bound together by their mutual gravity, one of 150 known globular clusters in our galaxy. These groups of stars are thought to form as a unit from the same collapsing cloud of gas, and thus the stars in them typically have similar ages. The stars in globular clusters tend to be ancient. At approximately 13 billion years old, NGC 6426 is one of the Milky Way’s oldest globular clusters and almost as old as the universe itself (13.7 billion years).