Stars, stars and more stars

All the bright dots you see in this image are in fact stars that belong to Palomar 6, one of the approximately 200 globular clusters in orbit around the Milky Way.

The cluster, located 25,000 light years away from Earth, contains approximately 500,000 stars. This image, taken by the Hubble Telescope, however, shows only the central part of the cluster, with a diameter of 15 light years, which is the densest region of stars.

Globular clusters are among the oldest structures in the Universe and the determination of their age allows us to establish limits on the age of the Universe itself. In particular, the stars of Palomar 6 all have an age of about 12.5 billion years. By comparison, the age of the Sun is 4.6 billion years.

Credit: ESA, Hubble, NASA, R. Cohen.ù