💫 Star cluster
47 Tucanae
The second-brightest globular cluster in the sky, next to the Small Magellanic Cloud.
- Kind
- Globular cluster: old stars packed into a ball
- Distance
- 17,000 light-years away
- Stars
- At least half a million
- Discovered
- 1751, by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille
Did you know?
- Hubble watched burned-out stars called white dwarfs slowly drifting from its crowded centre towards its edges, a journey of about 40 million years.
- Under dark skies it can be seen without a telescope from the southern half of Earth.
Photographed or visited by
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
The life of a starA step in a star’s life: a white dwarf
More NASA photos of 47 TucanaeStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of deep space
The Sun
Our star, an ordinary one that keeps everything here alive.
Betelgeuse
A red supergiant in Orion that will one day explode.
Alpha Centauri
The closest star system to the Sun.
Eta Carinae
A pair of giant stars, one of them about 90 times heavier than the Sun.
Mira
A red giant star racing through space with a tail like a comet.
Zeta Ophiuchi
A runaway star, flung out when its partner exploded.