Hubble Neatly Captures Messier's Ancient Stars

Posted by timothy on Saturday August 25, 2012 @06:11PM from the leaves-them-on-public-display dept.

New submitter DevotedSkeptic writes "Hubble has produced a crisp image of the Messier 56 Globular Cluster. Messier originally noted that this object was nebula without stars. When he originally viewed the cluster in 1779, telescopes were not powerful enough to see more than a fuzzy ball. The crisp focused view we get from Hubble enables us to easily see the globular cluster and ancient stars contained within. Comparing observations from Hubble with results from the standard theory of stellar evolution, scientists have calculated the age Messier 56 at 13 billion years."

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The Day we Found the Universe by esldude · 2012-08-25 18:29 · Score: 5, Interesting

http://www.amazon.com/The-Day-We-Found-Universe/dp/0307276600/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345962369&sr=8-1&keywords=the+day+we+discovered+the+universe#reader_0307276600 Delightful book about how we came to figure out there was more than the milky way, and just how much more. Details the history of the instruments used, the scientists involved and the ideas that battled it out until we understood how big things were. The Hubble is in the lineage of important instruments helping us learn how big all of space is. All the way back to 13 billion years or so of it.