#messier 67

[quiltofstars]

The King Cobra Cluster, M67 // Carlos Rincón

[celestial-music]

Open cluster Messier 67, one of the oldest known nearby stellar families. The reddish color of most of the stars indicates the cluster’s age, just a few hundred million years younger than our own sun. Roughly 2800 light years away from us, the stars in Messier 67 are four times more tightly grouped than the stars in our own stellar neighborhood.

This picture of Messier 67 is the product of nine science images in three different color filters corrected with a total of forty calibration images and subsequently mapped into RGB color channels. Images taken with the 24-inch Perkin telescope by two of my colleagues and myself at Van Vleck Observatory while designing a lab for an intro astronomy course. I did all the calibration and processing. :)

[quiltofstars]

The King Cobra Cluster, M67 // Alicia Rossiter

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The King Cobra Cluster, M67 // LittleGhost

This is one of the oldest open clusters known, and the oldest in Messier's catalog. It has an estimated age of around 3.2 billion years. This is striking since most open clusters are typically much younger and their stars should have dispersed by this time. Despite that, the King Cobra Cluster still has around 500 stars, and five stars have found to host planetary systems.

[quiltofstars]

The King Cobra Cluster, M67 // Giorgio Albertini

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M67 // simon harding

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M67 // Panagiotis Xipteras

[spaceexp]

Artist’s impression of a hot Jupiter exoplanet in the star cluster Messier 67 by European Southern Observatory on Flickr.

This artist’s impression shows a hot Jupiter planet orbiting close to one of the stars in the rich old star cluster Messier 67, in the constellation of Cancer (The Crab). Astronomers have found far more planets like this in the cluster than expected. This surprise result was obtained using a number of telescopes and instruments, among them the HARPS spectrograph at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The denser environment in a cluster will cause more frequent interactions between planets and nearby stars, which may explain the excess of hot Jupiters. More information: www.eso.org/public/images/eso1621a/ Credit: ESO/L. Calçada