NASA shares insane Hubble image of space object 11.6 billion years old

NASA has shared an image snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope of an object that resides 157,000 light years away and is approximately 11.6 billion years old.

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The Hubble Space Telescope has taken an awesome picture of the packed globular cluster known as NGC 2210, which is located within the Large Magellanic Cloud 157,000 light years away from Earth. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, which means it is gravitationally bound to our galaxy, and just like the Milky Way, it hosts millions of stars.

Globular clusters are tightly bound groups of stars that consist of thousands or even millions of stars, all gravitationally bound. As for NGC 2210, in 2017, researchers discerned through data analysis that this globular cluster is approximately 11.6 billion years old, making it only a couple billion years younger than the universe itself (13.8 billion years old).

"As well as being a source of interesting research, this old-but-relatively-young cluster is also extremely beautiful, with its highly concentrated population of stars. The night sky would look very different from the perspective of an inhabitant of a planet orbiting one of the stars in a globular cluster's center: the sky would appear to be stuffed full of stars, in a stellar environment that is thousands of times more crowded than our own," writes NASA