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NASA has been scouring the boundaries of space through the iconic Hubble Space Telescope for decades now and its latest mission has been to search for hidden monsters out there. While doing so, the Hubble Telescope snapped the densely packed globular cluster called NGC 6325. This concentrated group of stars lies around 26,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus.
What are globular clusters?
These are tightly bound collections of stars with anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of members. The constituent stars of globular clusters tend to form at roughly the same time, meaning astronomers can use them to fine-tune their theories of how stars evolve.
NGC 6325
NGC 6325 globular cluster was inspected not to understand star formation, but to search for a hidden monster, says NASA. Though it might look peaceful, astronomers suspect this cluster could contain an intermediate-mass black hole that is subtly affecting the motion of surrounding stars.
This suggests that at least some of these densely packed globular clusters – including perhaps NGC 6325 – could have a hiddem monster – a black hole – lurking at the center.
Starring Role of Hubble Telescope.
To find answers to their problems, astronomers turned to Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to observe a larger sample of densely populated globular clusters, which included this star-studded image of NGC 6325.
Additional data from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys was also incorporated into this image.
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