Lurking in the southwestern corner of Aquarius the Water-bearer, globular cluster M72 doesn’t stand out. At magnitude 9.4, it ranks among the dimmest globulars Charles Messier included in his celebrated catalog. But M72 also lies farther away than most Messier clusters. Its 100,000 stars shine across 55,000 light-years of intragalactic space. M72 appears to be about 9.5 billion years old, younger than most of our galaxy’s globulars. Astronomers suspect the Milky Way may have captured it when a smaller galaxy passed by long ago. The cluster’s central regions harbor many blue stragglers — hotter-than-typical globular stars that form either through mergers or the transfer of mass between binary companions. Hubble scientists created this image from observations at ultraviolet, optical, and infrared wavelengths.
