A cluster brimming with thousands and thousands of stars glistens like an iridescent opal on this picture from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Called Omega Centauri, the glowing orb of stars is sort of a miniature galaxy. It is the largest and brightest of the 150 or so related objects, referred to as globular clusters, that orbit across the exterior of our Milky Way galaxy. Stargazers at southern latitudes can spot the stellar gem with the bare eye within the constellation Centaurus. Globular clusters are a number of the oldest objects in our universe. Their stars are over 12 billion years previous, and, usually, fashioned unexpectedly when the universe was only a toddler. Omega Centauri is uncommon in that its stars are of various ages and possess various ranges of metals, or components heavier than boron. Astronomers say this factors to a special origin for Omega Centauri than different globular clusters: they assume it is perhaps the core of a dwarf galaxy that was ripped aside and absorbed by our Milky Way way back. In this new view of Omega Centauri, Spitzer’s infrared observations have been mixed with visible-light knowledge from the National Science Foundation’s Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Visible-light knowledge with a wavelength of .55 microns is coloured blue, 3.6-micron infrared mild captured by Spitzer’s infrared array digital camera is coloured inexperienced and 24-micron infrared mild taken by Spitzer’s multiband imaging photometer is coloured purple. Where inexperienced and purple overlap, the colour yellow seems. Thus, the yellow and purple dots are stars revealed by Spitzer. These stars, referred to as purple giants, are extra developed, bigger and dustier. The stars that seem blue have been noticed in each seen and three.6-micron-, or near-, infrared mild. They are much less developed, like our personal solar. Some of the purple spots within the image are distant galaxies past our personal.

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA; IR:NASA/JPL/Caltech; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk

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