NGC 3293

This star cluster, NGC 3293, is found 8,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina. The cluster was first spotted by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in 1751 using a tiny telescope with an aperture of just 12 millimetres. It is one of the brightest clusters in the southern sky and can be easily seen with the naked eye on a dark clear night.

Star clusters like NGC 3293 contain stars that all formed at the same time, at the same distance from Earth and out of the same giant cloud of molecular gas and dust, giving them the same chemical composition. Most of the stars seen here are very young, and the cluster itself is less than 10 million years old. The stars are held together by their mutual gravitational attraction, but these forces are not enough to hold a cluster together against close encounters with other clusters and clouds of gas as the cluster’s own gas and dust dissipate. So, open clusters will only last a few hundred million years.

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