Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Peng (Peking University, Beijing)

NGC 4660, imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, is a member of the Virgo cluster of galaxies, the nearest large galaxy cluster to Earth. NGC 4660 contains 205 globular clusters. The galaxy possesses a typical number of globular clusters for its size and brightness. Globular clusters, dense bunches of hundreds of thousands of stars, have some of the oldest surviving stars in the universe. Most of the star clusters in the Virgo survey are older than 5 billion years. Hubble's "eye" is so sharp that it was able to pick out the fuzzy globular clusters, which, at that distance, look like individual stars bunched up around the galaxies, instead of groupings of stars. Comprised of over 2,000 galaxies, the Virgo cluster is located about 54 million light-years away.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2008/news-2008-30

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

Image Use Policy: http://hubblesite.org/copyright/