This colorful view of globular star cluster Terzan 12 reveals a compact beehive of hundreds of thousands of stars crowded together, seen in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Unlike other globular clusters orbiting our home galaxy, Terzan 12 is embedded among the billions of stars inside the Milky Way’s disk of dust and gas. For astronomers, it’s like trying to see the forest for the trees.
Credit: NASA, ESA.
ALT TEXT: The image shows a compact beehive-like structure of hundreds of thousands of stars crowded together. Because of scattering by interstellar dust, the stars on the left side of the image appear redder. The stars toward the right side are bluish-white. The image is sprinkled with bright blue foreground stars. There is also a smattering of bright red giant stars across the image.
