A Hubble gem: the Jewel Box

esahubble_heic0913a October 29th, 2009

Credit: NASA/ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain)

This image is a "close-up' view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 4755, or the Jewel Box cluster. Several very bright, pale blue supergiant stars, a solitary ruby-red supergiant and a variety of other brilliantly coloured stars are visible in the image, as well as many much fainter ones, often with intriguing colours. The huge variety in brightness exists because the brighter stars are 15 to 20 times the mass of the Sun, while the dimmest stars are less than half the mass of the Sun. This is the first image of an open galactic cluster with imaging extending from the far ultraviolet to the near-infrared.

Provider: Hubble Space Telescope | ESA

Image Source: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0913a/

Curator: ESA/Hubble, Garching bei München, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License