Thu 31 Jul 2008
I Love These!!!!
Posted by dad under Nice Picture
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A giant star cluster seen in the Cassiopeia constellation contains over 15,000 stars.
NGC 7789 emerged 1.5 billion years ago as a gas cloud that served as an interstellar birthing ground. The cluster entered human knowledge more recently in 1782, when Astronomer Caroline Herschel discovered it while working with her brother, William Herschel, on a Deep Sky survey.
The open cluster currently lies near the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, about 8,000 light-years away. All the stars in the cluster appear to have been born around the same time, but the more massive siblings have more rapidly consumed their hydrogen fuel in their cores.
Credit: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope/Coelum