![]() You can draw your own conclusions on the contributions of New Coke and the “W” Bush years. Many other spinoffs - film and commercial - have come to similar (predictable) fates. Canceled after two utterly forgettable seasons, the show was an unmitigated disaster. When the show’s already-low ratings started to flag in the second season, the producers tossed in future Baywatch (Days) star Donna D’Errico and rearranged the series around a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque plot replete with werewolves and vampires (with Hasselhoff behind the stake). Curiously, Nights subtracted the babes and transplanted the Hoff into a detective agency. Take Baywatch Nights, the offshoot of the ’90s beach drama that bombarded audiences with bodacious, buxom bods (and, with 1.1 billion viewers worldwide - surely transfixed by the engrossing storylines - once the number-one show in the world). (and, quite often, above) the competition These Hubble observations of Omega Centauri are part of the Hubble Servicing Mission 4 Early Release Observations.Far and away the most tested watches in the world, Omega’s Speedmasters have remained miles beyond Hubble observed Omega Centauri on July 15, 2009, in ultraviolet and visible light. Named by Johann Bayer in 1603 as the 24th brightest object in the constellation Centaurus, it resembles a small cloud in the southern sky and might easily be mistaken for a comet. It is one of the few globular clusters that can be seen with the unaided eye. Omega Centauri is among the biggest and most massive of some 200 globular clusters orbiting the Milky Way. Some astronomers think that the cluster may be the remnant of a small galaxy that was gravitationally disrupted long ago by the Milky Way, losing stars and gas. Evidence suggests, however, that Omega Centauri has at least two populations of stars with different ages. Globular clusters were thought to be assemblages of stars that share the same birth date. If anyone lived in this globular cluster, they would behold a star-saturated sky that is roughly 100 times brighter than Earth's sky. Although the stars are close together, WFC3's sharpness can resolve each of them as individual stars. The average distance between any two stars in the cluster's crowded core is only about a third of a light-year, roughly 13 times closer than our Sun's nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. The encounters boost the stars' energy-production rate, making them appear bluer.Īll of the stars in the image are cozy neighbors. ![]() Other stars that appear in the image are so-called "blue stragglers." They are older stars that acquire a new lease on life when they collide and merge with other stars. They will continue to cool and grow dimmer for many billions of years until they become dark cinders. White dwarfs are no longer generating energy through nuclear fusion and have gravitationally contracted to the size of Earth. Only their burned-out cores remain, and they are called white dwarfs (the faint blue dots in the image). When the helium runs out, the stars reach the end of their lives. At this stage, they emit much of their light at ultraviolet wavelengths. These stars are desperately trying to extend their lives by fusing helium in their cores. Only a thin layer of material covers their super-hot cores. These bright red stars swell to many times larger than our Sun's size and begin to shed their gaseous envelopes.Īfter ejecting most of their mass and exhausting much of their hydrogen fuel, the stars appear brilliant blue. These late-life stars are the orange dots in the image.Įven later in their life cycles, the stars continue to cool down and expand in size, becoming red giants. Toward the end of their normal lives, the stars become cooler and larger. ![]() These are adult stars that are shining by hydrogen fusion. ![]() The majority of the stars in the image are yellow-white, like our Sun. The photograph showcases the camera's color versatility by revealing a variety of stars in key stages of their life cycles. The camera can snap sharp images over a broad range of wavelengths. This is one of the first images taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), installed aboard Hubble in May 2009, during Servicing Mission 4. The cluster lies about 16,000 light-years from Earth. The stars in Omega Centauri are between 10 billion and 12 billion years old. Globular clusters, ancient swarms of stars united by gravity, are the homesteaders of our Milky Way galaxy. The image reveals a small region inside the massive globular cluster Omega Centauri, which boasts nearly 10 million stars. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope snapped this panoramic view of a colorful assortment of 100,000 stars residing in the crowded core of a giant star cluster. Colorful Stars Galore Inside Globular Star Cluster Omega Centauri ![]()
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