The Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys captured this view of NGC 362 which, being a globular cluster, contains hundreds of thousands of stars and resides in the outskirts of a galaxy.
NGC 362’s host galaxy is our own Milky Way but it’s a bit of an oddity – it boasts a surprisingly high metal content, indicating that it is between 10 and 11 billion years old.
Globular clusters are usually older than their galactic home – but the Milky Way is estimated to be more than 13 billion years old.
Originally published by Cosmos as Cluster lustre
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