Diamonds in the Tail of the Scorpion. Messier 7 NGC 6475
Can you see the United Kingdom in a pattern of stars
A image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the bright star cluster Messier 7. Easily spotted with the naked eye close to the tail of the constellation of Scorpius, it is one of the most prominent open clusters of stars in the sky making it an important astronomical research target.
Messier 7, also known as NGC 6475, is a brilliant cluster of about 100 stars located some 800 light-years from Earth. In this new picture from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope it stands out against a very rich background of hundreds of thousands of fainter stars, in the direction of the centre of the Milky Way.
At about 200 million years old, Messier 7 is a typical middle-aged open cluster, spanning a region of space about 25 light-years across. As they age, the brightest stars in the picture a population of up to a tenth of the total stars in the cluster will violently explode as supernovae.
Looking further into the future, the remaining faint stars, which are much more numerous, will slowly drift apart until they become no longer recognisable as a cluster.
Open star clusters like Messier 7 are groups of stars born at almost the same time and place, from large cosmic clouds of gas and dust in their host galaxy. These groups of stars are of great interest to scientists, because the stars in them have about the same age and chemical composition.
This makes them invaluable for studying stellar structure and evolution.
Diamonds in the Tail of the Scorpion
ESO image of star cluster Messier 7
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1406
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