NASA treats stargazers with 'eye-candy'; shares dazzling Hubble image of a star cluster

NASA has offered another treat to its fans as it shared a spectacular image of a star cluster glittering at its best. Captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC), the picture features the dazzling globular cluster Liller 1.

"Here's some #HubbleFriday eye candy! The globular star cluster Liller 1 is seen here in muted red tones, partially obscured by a scattering of piercingly blue stars. Liller 1 is only 30,000 light-years from Earth – which is neighborly in cosmic terms (sic)," the Hubble team wrote in a tweet. 

What's special about it?

The specialty of this image is the clear view of the Liller 1 star cluster. NASA says that all credit goes to Hubble's WFC3, which is sensitive to wavelengths of light that the human eye can’t detect. However, the muted red tones of the globular cluster are partially obscured in this image by a dense scattering of piercingly blue stars. As mentioned above, the star cluster lies about 30,000 light-years from Earth, which according to NASA, is relatively not so far, but the cluster actually lies in the dense and dusty region at the Milky Way's center. 

The agency says this is the reason why this star cluster is heavily obscured from view by interstellar dust, which scatters visible light, particularly blue light, very effectively. But thanks to the WFC3's capabilities, it is sensitive to visible and near-infrared wavelengths, both of which can pass through the dusty cosmic regions. 

As for the cluster itself, it is seen as an interesting one because unlike most of its kind, it contains a mix of very young and very old stars. Astronomers have found such globular clusters to typically house only old stars, with some being almost as old as the universe itself, approximately 14 billion years old. Interestingly, the cluster contains stars belonging to two distinct stellar populations as the oldest star here is 12 billion years old whereas the youngest is just one to two billion years old. "This led astronomers to conclude that this stellar system was able to form stars over an extraordinarily long period of time", the agency said in a statement.