NASA's Hubble spots massive cluster of 10 billion-years-old stars

• Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected a stunning image of a huge collection of ageing stars, believed to be 10 billion-years-old. This rich and dense smattering of stars is a massive globular cluster, a gravitationally bound collection of stars that orbits the Milky Way.
• Globular clusters are denser and more spherical than open star clusters like the famous Pleiades.
• They typically contain hundreds of thousands of stars that are thought to have formed at roughly the same time.

About the Hubble Space Telescope:

• The Hubble Space Telescope is a large telescope in space. It was launched into orbit by space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.
• Hubble orbits about 547 kilometers (340 miles) above Earth. It is the length of a large school bus and weighs as much as two adult elephants.
• Hubble travels about 5 miles per second: That is like traveling from the eastern coast of the United States to the western coast in 10 minutes. Hubble is solar-powered.
• Hubble takes sharp pictures of objects in the sky such as planets, stars and galaxies. Hubble has made more than one million observations.
• These include detailed pictures of the birth and death of stars, galaxies billions of light years away, and comet pieces crashing into Jupiter's atmosphere.
• Earth’s atmosphere alters and blocks the light that comes from space. Hubble orbits above Earth’s atmosphere, which gives it a better view of the universe than telescopes have at ground level.
• Hubble is named after an American astronomer, Edwin P. Hubble. He made important discoveries in the early 1900s. He showed that the galaxy containing the solar system -- the Milky Way -- was only one of many galaxies. His work helped show that the universe is expanding. This led to the big-bang theory, which says that the universe began with an intense burst of energy and has been expanding ever since.
• As Hubble orbits Earth, the Fine Guidance Sensors lock onto stars. The Fine Guidance Sensors are part of the Pointing Control System and aim Hubble in the right direction. The telescope can lock onto a target that is one mile away without moving more than the width of a human hair.
• Once the target is acquired, Hubble's primary mirror collects light. The mirror can collect about 40,000 times more light than the human eye. The light bounces off the primary mirror to the secondary mirror.
• The secondary mirror focuses the light back through a hole in the primary mirror. From there, the light shines to Hubble's scientific instruments. Each instrument has a different way of interpreting the light.
• Hubble has five scientific instruments which include cameras and spectrographs. A spectrograph is an instrument that splits light into its individual wavelengths.

By: Vishal