NASA/ESA Hubble snaps vast cosmic treasure chest: Check out this dazzling picture

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured this star-studded picture featuring the globular cluster Terzan 9 in the constellation Sagittarius, towards the centre of our home galaxy - the Milky Way.

Globular clusters are stable, tightly bound clusters of tens of thousands to millions of stars and the intense gravitational attraction between the closely packed stars gives them their regular, spherical shape.

Sharing this image, the European Space Agency wrote in a post, "As this image demonstrates, the hearts of globular clusters can be densely packed with stars; the night sky in this image is strewn with so many stars that it resembles a sea of sequins or a vast treasure chest crammed with gold."

Milky Way's central region contains a tightly packed group of stars known as the Galactic bulge, which is also rich in interstellar dust. This interstellar dust has made globular clusters near the Galactic centre difficult to study, as it absorbs starlight and can even change the apparent colours of the stars in these clusters.

Hubble used two of its powerful instruments - Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) - to capture this image of Terzan 9. The WFC3 was installed during Hubble Servicing Mission 4 in 2009 while ACS was installed on the premium observatory during Servicing Mission 3B in 2002.

The Hubble Space Telescope's sensitivity at both visible and infrared wavelengths of light has allowed astronomers to measure how the colours of these globular clusters have been changed by interstellar dust, and thereby to establish their ages.

Our latest Picture of the Week features a cosmic treasure chest! This star-studded image shows the globular cluster Terzan 9 in the constellation Sagittarius, towards the centre of the Milky Way.🔗 https://t.co/FlvL1I8jNQ Credit: @esa / @HUBBLE_space / @NASA , R. Cohen pic.twitter.com/zZN9pFQ5VN

— HUBBLE (@HUBBLE_space) June 13, 2022