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Astronomy: Messier 10 an old star cluster
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In this picture of M10 you can distinguish two major bright stellar populations: the blue and the brighter orange colored stars. The latter ones are red giants which exhausted the hydrogen in their cores and are now burning hydrogen in a shell. The blue stars are a step ahead in a quite stable phase of helium burning in their cores. The evolutionary transition between the red giants and the blue "horizontal branch" stars remains still unclear. Almost no normal hydrogen core burning stars are visible in M10. They all evolved to the above described phases. Just the faintest and lowest mass stars are still burning hydrogen and appear very faint grey in the image. Related subjects>> Messier catalog of 110 deep sky objects>> Charles Messier >> Milky Way Galaxy |
 The star cluster M10 < JPG image 662 X 529 pixels > |
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