Messier 72

Image credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA

Pierre Méchain, a French astronomer and colleague of Charles Messier, discovered the globular cluster M72 in 1780. It was the first of five star clusters that Méchain would discover while assisting Messier and, at a distance of 50,000 light-years from Earth, it is one of the most remote clusters in Messier’s catalog. M72 is located in the constellation Aquarius and has an apparent magnitude of 9.4. The cluster appears as a faint patch of light in small telescopes, and the best time to observe it is during September.

A globular cluster is an ancient, spherical collection of old stars that are packed very closely together toward the cluster’s center. The stars in the cluster orbit around a mutual center of gravity at this dense core. Roughly 150 globular clusters have been discovered in the Milky Way galaxy.

This image of M72 from Hubble combines observations at visible and infrared wavelengths. Capturing huge numbers of stars in the cluster itself, the picture also reveals many galaxies that are much more distant than M72, seen between and around the cluster stars.

Image credit: Image courtesy of Stellarium

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