Nasa Pictures The Oldest Stars In The Galaxy (PICTURES)

PICTURES: The Oldest Stars In The Galaxy

Nasa has revealed a new picture of the oldest stars in the galaxy.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured the shot of what appears to be thousands of cameras flashing at once, but is in fact Messier 107, a cluster of stars which is the most ancient in the galaxy.

The Wide Field Camera of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys was used for the picture.

Messier 107 is just one of the more than 150 globular star clusters found around the Milky Way galaxy, Nasa explains on its website.

Starn clusters are spherical, and contain hundreds of thousands of stars each.

Messier 107 itself is about 20,000 light years from our solar system - too far for humans to likely ever see up close - and is found in the constellation of Ophiuchus.

How such clusters form is not precisely known, and neither is the role they have in the development of a galaxy - but Nasa says its researchers are continuing to study the phonemena.

Nasa said of Messier 107:

French astronomer Pierre Méchain first noted the object in 1782, and British astronomer William Herschel documented it independently a year later. A Canadian astronomer, Helen Sawyer Hogg, added Messier 107 to Charles Messier's famous astronomical catalogue in 1947.

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