10.5-billion-year-old cluster is home to heavy metal stars!

New Delhi: The US space agency NASA has released a beautiful photograph of the heavy-metal stars.

A 10.5-billion-year-old globular cluster which is called NGC 6496, is home to these heavy-metal stars of a celestial kind.

The cluster is about 35,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion).

This cluster, NGC 6496 was discovered in 1826 by James Dunlop, a Scottish astronomer.

And the stars is made up of this spherical cluster that are enriched with higher proportions of metals and elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are curiously known as metals in astronomy.

NGC 6496 hosts a selection of long-period variables like giant pulsating stars whose brightness can take up to, and even over, a thousand days to change and short-period eclipsing binaries, which dim when eclipsed by a stellar companion.

The nature of the variability of these stars can reveal important information about their mass, radius, luminosity, temperature, composition, and evolution, providing astronomers with measurements that would be difficult or even impossible to obtain through other methods.

Source: NASA