💫 Star cluster
Omega Centauri
The biggest and brightest globular cluster in the sky, with about 10 million stars.
- Kind
- Globular cluster: old stars packed into a ball
- Distance
- 17,000 light-years away
- Size
- 450 light-years across
- Stars
- About 10 million
Did you know?
- It is about 10 times as massive as other big globular clusters, almost as massive as a small galaxy.
- Its stars are of different ages, unusual for a cluster, so it may be what is left of a small galaxy that lost its outer stars.
- It can be seen without a telescope, but only from the southern half of Earth and the northern tropics.
Find it in the sky
Photographed or visited by
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Compare Omega Centauri with the Milky WaySide by side, to scale, in the app
More NASA photos of Omega CentauriStraight 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.