Although our telescopes often get great views of galaxies far, far away, sometimes we forget that there is beauty closer to home, in our own Milky Way.
Now, one of those beautiful views from our own backyard comes courtesy of the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) La Silla Observatory in Chile. This telescope captured a gorgeous image of star cluster NGC 3532, located 1,300 light-years from Earth in our galaxy's Carina constellation.
NGC 3532 is more commonly known as the Wishing Well Cluster because it looks like the bottom of a well with coins scattered about it. It's also often called the Football Cluster because of its shape.
The cluster itself, which contains around 400 stars, is about 300 million years old. The colors of the stars tell us a lot about their ages and lifespans. The brightly shining blue stars seen here are stars with moderate masses. Orange-red stars are those stars that have already burned off their hydrogen because of their heavier masses.
Fainter stars with lower masses are those with yellow and light red tones. Stars with lower masses last longer because they don't burn through their energy as quickly. Their expected lifespans are hundreds of billions of years, which is older than the age of the Universe itself.
The most massive stars, though, are gone, because those stars have short lives and exploded as a supernova a long time ago. These kinds of stars have masses greater than our sun's, which means that they only live around a few million years.
The background of the image shows an area of the Milky Way that is teeming with stars.
The NGC 3532 cluster was first discovered by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1752. Sadly, that means that some of the stars he first saw in the cluster have probably exploded and are no longer there.
NGC 3532 is easily seen with the naked eye from the Earth's southern hemisphere and covers about twice the size of the moon in its patch of the sky. NGC 3532 was also the first celestial object observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990.
[Photo Credit: ESO]
