September 12, 2018 by Jen
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
A colorful collection of 100,000 stars are displayed in this small region inside the Omega Centauri globular cluster, a dense group of nearly 10 million stars. This beautiful destination in the sky lies about 16,000 light years away from Earth. Omega Centauri is one of the biggest star clusters in our very own Milky Way Galaxy.
This picture was snapped by the panoramic view of the Hubble Space Telescope. Color versatility reflects the type and age of stars throughout their lifecycles. Yellow and white stars are very much like our sun, they shine brightly as hydrogen is fused deep inside their cores. Later-life stars appear to us as orange and red, they will become cooler and larger as time passes. Stars that are older will accumulate heavier elemental abundances like metals and carbon; whereas young stars have mostly hydrogen and helium, along with a small amount of heavier elements mixed in from their days of their creation.
This picture revealed a small region inside the massive star cluster called Omega Centauri that is home to more than 10 million stars! Hubble observed Omega Centauri on July 15, 2009, in ultraviolet and visible light spectrums.
Bright white and yellow stars are very much like our sun, they shine brilliantly as hydrogen is fused deep inside their cores. Later-in-life stars may appear as orange and red as they become cooler and expand.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
A colorful collection of 100,000 stars are displayed in this small region inside the Omega Centauri globular cluster, a dense group of nearly 10 million stars. This beautiful destination in the sky lies about 16,000 light years away from Earth. Omega Centauri is one of the biggest star clusters in our very own Milky Way Galaxy.
This picture was snapped by the panoramic view of the Hubble Space Telescope. Color versatility reflects the type and age of stars throughout their lifecycles. Yellow and white stars are very much like our sun, they shine brightly as hydrogen is fused deep inside their cores. Later-life stars appear to us as orange and red, they will become cooler and larger as time passes. Stars that are older will accumulate heavier elemental abundances like metals and carbon; whereas young stars have mostly hydrogen and helium, along with a small amount of heavier elements mixed in from their days of their creation.
This picture revealed a small region inside the massive star cluster called Omega Centauri that is home to more than 10 million stars! Hubble observed Omega Centauri on July 15, 2009, in ultraviolet and visible light spectrums.
Bright white and yellow stars are very much like our sun, they shine brilliantly as hydrogen is fused deep inside their cores. Later-in-life stars may appear as orange and red as they become cooler and expand.
Older stars begin to produce and accumulate heavier elements like metals and carbons; whereas young stars are composed of mostly hydrogen and helium. Large planets are also made of hydrogen and helium as well, these lighter gases can be lost in smaller planets.
Omega Centauri is one of the few stars clusters that can be seen with the naked eye, it appears as a small cloud from the Southern Sky in the constellation of Centaurus; Omega Centauri is one of the biggest and brightest star clusters in the Milky Way.
When stars expand they also eject materials from their cores, exhausting their fuel supplies. When a star runs out of helium it has reached the end of its life, only a burned up core called a white dwarf will remain.
White dwarfs no longer generate heat energy via nuclear fusion, instead they will gravitationally contract as they continue to cool and dim for billions of years.. until all their energy is gone.
The stars making up Omega Centauri average from 10 billion to 12 billion years of age. Globular clusters are large swarms of stars tightly bound by gravity through out space time. Globular clusters can remain intact for over 12 billion years and can also be incorporated into Galaxies.
If we lived in Omega Centauri we would see a sky brightly lit with stars a hundred times brighter than on Earth.
As stars emit radiation in different electromagnetic wavelengths; the type of radiated light-waves emitted is dependent upon the temperature and conditions of each star.
A cooler star at about 3000 Kelvins emits light in the infra-red spectrum. A star with a temperature above 4000 Kelvins will also emit light-waves in the ultra-violet light spectrum. Stars like our sun, burn above 5000 Kelvins and emit the visible light that we can see.
Extremely hot stars can be either; Type A of type B stars which can have temperatures above 10,000 Kelvins. These stars shine in brilliant blue spectrums.
Omega Centauri is actually a global cluster; not an open cluster which makes it different than other star clusters like the Pleiades and Hyades that are open star clusters.
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