The Chilean VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) telescope, measuring 4.1 meters and located in the Paranal Observatory of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, has delighted us with the images of the tens of thousands of stars agglutinated in Messier 55 , the oldest in the Universe.
Nicolas Louis de Lacaille was the first person to document this stellar group in 1752, however, it was the French astronomer Charles Messier who took the glory and, 26 years later, placed it in his catalog with the number 55. In addition of how Messier 55 this object is known as NGC 6809 according to the New General Catalog created at the end of the XIX century.
This stellar accumulation is located about 17,000 light years from Earth and yet it can be seen with a small telescope within the constellation of Sagittarius . In a diameter of only 25 times the distance between the Sun and the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, thousands of stars accumulate as if they were inside a can of sardines.
By studying the stars in these globular clusters that surround our galaxy (about 160 have been detected so far), astronomers have discovered that they originated more than 10 billion years ago from the same gas cloud. This data is extremely important, since it occurred a few billion years after the Big Bang.
