October 17, 1998
Somewhere between the Big Bang and this birthday, the universe learned how to make kindness, curiosity, humor, memory, and hope.
A Giant Globular Cluster in M31
Birthday · October 17, 1998
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
Free PNG · 1080 × 1350 · No account needed
Image rights and credit requirements apply when sharing or reusing imagery.
Date & occasion only
Change the year
APOD published October 17, 1998. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
This cluster of stars, known as G1, is the brightest globular cluster in the whole Local Group of galaxies. Also called Mayall II, it orbits the center of the largest nearby galaxy: M31. G1 contains over 300,000 stars and is almost as old as the entire universe. In fact, observations of this globular star cluster show it to be as old as the oldest of the roughly 250 known globular clusters in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Two bright foreground stars appear in this image of G1 taken with the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in July of 1994. It shows detail in the distant cluster comparable to ground-based telescopic views of globular star clusters in our own Galaxy.