Prepared by: Mustafa Al-Zoubi
The Hubble Telescope has detected a group of glittering globular clusters of stars in the galaxy “Pismis 26” in the constellation Scorpius, which is located 23,000 light-years from our galaxy. Astronomers at the Hubble Observatory estimate the age of a cluster to be 12 billion years.
Globular clusters are groups of stars bound together by each other’s gravity, containing thousands of tightly packed stars. The constellation Scorpius is distinguished by the density of spherical stars surrounding its black hole, rather than planets.
Scientists explain that the clusters are distinguished by the colors red and blue, and they attribute the reason for the predominance of the two colors to the overlapping of short and long wavelengths, as the dust is scattered by the shorter wavelength blue light , while red light of wavelength greater than the wavelength passes through it.
The spherical stars discovered in Pismis 26 are highly metallic, containing a high proportion of hydrogen and helium, the two most abundant elements in the universe.
