March 10, 2022
In the grand ledger of cosmic time, a human life is breathtakingly brief. But brevity is not insignificance.
Globular Star Cluster 47 Tuc
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APOD published March 10, 2022. Credit: Bernard Miller. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Globular star cluster 47 Tucanae is a jewel of the southern sky. Also known as NGC 104, it roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy along with some 200 other globular star clusters. The second brightest globular cluster (after Omega Centauri) as seen from planet Earth, 47 Tuc lies about 13,000 light-years away. It can be spotted with the naked-eye close on the sky to the Small Magellanic Cloud in the constellation of the Toucan. The dense cluster is made up of hundreds of thousands of stars in a volume only about 120 light-years across. Red giant stars on the outskirts of the cluster are easy to pick out as yellowish stars in this sharp telescopic portrait. Tightly packed globular cluster 47 Tuc is also home to a star with the closest known orbit around a black hole.
Image credit: Bernard Miller