Bernard Miller has a nice image of M10 in the September Astronomy. Although M10 has a lookalike neighbor, M12, the picture is only of the one. Harlow Shapley's 1933 distance for M10 was ~33,000 light years. We now know it to be less than 15,000 light years away. Long-term exposures reveal the cluster to span two-thirds of a Full Moon's width.
It seems to me M10 has more bright blue stars than the typical globular cluster. They are described by NASA as "horizontal branch giants", which can burn helium into carbon! Apparently, even our Sun will undergo this phase, wherein the "triple alpha process" fuses three helium nuclei into carbon-12. If the resulting carbon fuses with yet another helium nuclei, the result is oxygen-16.
More information:
September 2011 Astronomy, p. 70.
http://seds.org/messier/m/m010.html
Burnham's Celestial Handbook, pp.1261.
M10
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Christopher K.
- Posts: 6196
- Joined: October 12th, 2009, 3:28 pm
- Location: Baton Rouge, LA
Re: M10
Here's a nice view of M10 acquired by Hubble...
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubbl ... r-m10.html
On Friday the 15th, 7:30pm at the Highland Road Park Observatory, LSU undergraduate Rory Bentley will give a presentation on star clusters (globular and open). Rory is a former HRPO Apprentice and is currently in the Physics and Astronomy department at LSU. This will be his first public talk at HRPO. The talk is aimed at an adult audience and has no admission fee.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubbl ... r-m10.html
On Friday the 15th, 7:30pm at the Highland Road Park Observatory, LSU undergraduate Rory Bentley will give a presentation on star clusters (globular and open). Rory is a former HRPO Apprentice and is currently in the Physics and Astronomy department at LSU. This will be his first public talk at HRPO. The talk is aimed at an adult audience and has no admission fee.