The Hubble Reveals the Evolving Core of a Dense Star Cluster

STScI-PRC1990-23

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

This picture shows the central region of the globular cluster M15 as imaged by the Wide Field/Planetary Camera of the Hubble Space Telescope. M15 is a tightly bound cluster of about a million stars contained within our own galaxy. At the center of the image, the density of stars is roughly a million times what it is in our own part of the galaxy. Analysis of this image shows that M15 is now recovering from an implosion in which the stars in the cluster center collapsed into a dense aggregate. This image has been processed to remove the effects of spherical aberration. At the distance of M15, the region shown is 2.26 light-years on a side.

Object Names: M15, NGC 7078

Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI

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