Glittering time capsule: Hubble peers into a galaxy's past

Today's Image of the Day from the European Space Agency features a dazzling view of the globular cluster NGC 1786, which was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.  Unlike open clusters, which are younger and more loosely arranged, globular clusters are tightly concentrated and typically located in a galaxy’s halo. The globular cluster NGC 1786 is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) - a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years from Earth.  “NGC 1786 itself is in the constellation...