(ORDO NEWS) — Like a glittering swarm of buzzing bees, the stars of globular cluster NGC 6440 shine brightly in this image taken by NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope.
The cluster is located about 28,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.
Globular clusters like NGC 6440 are spherical, densely packed clusters of stars that inhabit the outskirts of galaxies.
They contain hundreds of thousands to millions of stars that are, on average, about one light-year apart.
The data used to create this image was obtained from five different Hubble observing programs, four of which focused on studying the properties of pulsars.
Pulsars are highly magnetized rotating neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation from their magnetic poles. To us, this beam looks like a short flash. Pulsars spin extremely fast.
Astronomers have recorded that the fastest pulsar rotates at 716 revolutions per second, but theoretically a pulsar can spin at 1,500 revolutions per second before it slowly loses energy or breaks apart.
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