Fact Sheet
Home of the Giants
Nope, it's not Candlestick Park or even Corporate-Sponsor-of-the-Month Park in San Francisco. Instead, it's a star cluster toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy that contains at least 14 red supergiant stars, which are some of the largest and most massive stars in the galaxy. These stars will live brief lives, then blast themselves apart as supernovae. The cluster contains at least 20,000 stars. The supergiant stars are easy to pick out in this infrared image.[Credit: NASA/NSF/2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/D.Figer (STScI/Rochester Institute of Technology)]
|