14 DAY TRIAL // The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope was recently used to capture a new image of the massive globular cluster called Messier 68. The spherical, gravitationally bound structure is located relatively close to Earth, at a distance of just 33,000 light-years.
The stars in this crowded region of space contain relatively low amounts of metal, mainly because many are very old. The age of the cluster is estimated at around 11.2 billion years, meaning that it began forming just 2.5 billion years after the Big Bang.
Messier 68 has a radius of more than 53 light-years – compared to the Milky Way's radius of 120,000 light-years – and is located in the constellation Hydra. It is a part of a group containing more than 150 globular clusters, spread out around the Milky Way.
This image Hubble snapped is one of the most precise and detailed to date, and it gives us a clear impression of just how massive this structure is. Astronomers estimate that it contains hundreds of thousands of stars, many of them very old.