Jewels don't shine this bright -- only stars do.
And almost every spot in this jewel-box of an image from the
Hubble Space Telescope is a star.
Now, some stars are more red than our
Sun,
and some more blue -- but all of them are much farther away.
Although it takes light about 8 minutes to reach
Earth from the Sun,
NGC 1898 is so far away that it takes light about 160,000
years to get here.
This
huge ball of stars, NGC 1898, is called a
globular cluster and resides in the
central bar of the
Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) -- a
satellite galaxy of our
Milky Way Galaxy.
The
featured multi-colored image includes light from the
infrared to the
ultraviolet
and was taken to help determine if the
stars of NGC 1898 all formed at the same time or at different times.
There are increasing indications that most
globular clusters formed stars in stages, and that, in particular,
stars from NGC 1898 formed shortly after
ancient encounters with the
Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and our Milky Way Galaxy.