Astronomers uncover faintest stars ever seen in star cluster

An international team of astronomers led by Harvey Richer of the University of British Columbia of Canada has uncovered the faintest stars ever seen in any globular star cluster, according to the latest issue of Science.

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the team took hundreds of high-resolution photos and compared the images pixel-by-pixel to identify the dimmest stars in the globular star cluster NGC 6397. This will bring scientists closer to revealing the formation time of one of the earliest generations of stars in the universe.

"The light from these faint stars is so dim that it is equivalent to that produced by a birthday candle on the Moon, as seen from Earth," said Richer, lead investigator of the project, which was chosen over several thousand other proposals to gain almost five days of access to Hubble.