Cluster of Stars from The beauty of the heavens : a pictorial display of the astronomical phenomena of the universe

Object Details

Book Title: The beauty of the heavens : a pictorial display of the astronomical phenomena of the universe : one hundred and four coloured scenes, illustrating a familiar lecture on astronomy
Caption: Cluster of Stars
Educational Notes: In this image, you can see how an artist has drawn a cluster of stars. But what exactly are stars, and why do they cluster? A staris a huge, glowing ball of gases. The star closest to us on Earth is the sun, but there are hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy. Some of these stars group together in a cluster because of gravitational pull. This can happen in a loose group of younger stars called an open star cluster; a famous example of this is Pleiades. There can also be a tighter group, containing thousands of stars, called a globularcluster. They cling together, revolving around their galaxies, along with other globular clusters (there are 150 in the Milky Way alone!). A famous globular cluster can be seen in theconstellation of Hercules. Sometimes, a very large star becomes unstable and collapses into itself. The gravitythat it creates is so strong that it sucks surrounding objects into it; we call this a Black Hole!

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