Explanation:
Jewels don't shine this bright -- only stars do.
Like gems in a jewel box, though, the stars of
open cluster
NGC 290 glitter in a
beautiful display of brightness and color.
The photogenic cluster,
pictured above, was captured recently by the orbiting
Hubble Space Telescope.
Open clusters of stars are younger, contain few stars,
and contain a much higher fraction of blue stars than do
globular clusters of stars.
NGC 290 lies about 200,000
light-years
distant in a neighboring galaxy called the
Small Cloud of Magellan (SMC).
The open cluster contains hundreds of stars
and spans about 65 light years across.
NGC 290 and other open clusters are good laboratories for studying how
stars of different masses evolve,
since all the open cluster's stars were born at about the same time.
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