תמונה חדשה מטלסקופ האבל חושפת סודות על צביר הכוכבים

The Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 6723 (the Chandelier Cluster), released on June 26, 2026, combines two observing programs and five filters from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys to produce a detailed composite showing blue stars concentrated toward the cluster's center and orange stars scattered around its outskirts . The cluster is located 27,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius .

Key findings

• Initial survey (Sarajedini) — Hubble first observed NGC 6723 as part of a large survey of 65 Milky Way globular clusters using visible and near-infrared light . This survey, led by Anto Sarajedini, was designed to characterize globular cluster properties by studying their stellar populations .

• Ultraviolet follow-up (Piotto) — A second team, led by Giampaolo Piotto, conducted a follow-up study using ultraviolet light . This analysis revealed that the cluster, which is over 10 billion years old, experienced two closely spaced periods of star formation that occurred within 634 million years of each other . Such "multiple stellar populations" with small age gaps help explain how globular clusters built up their stars in rapid succession rather than in a single burst .

• Composite image details — The final image uses data from five filters across Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys . It shows bright blue stars packed toward the dense core and older, orange-tinted stars populating the outer regions .

• Significance for globular cluster formation — These observations help astronomers understand that many globular clusters formed in distinct, closely spaced episodes rather than all at once . The ability to resolve age differences of only a few hundred million years within a 10-billion-year-old cluster provides direct evidence for the "multiple population" paradigm of globular cluster formation .