Barnard 86, NGC 6520, Inkspot Nebula (Doug Summers)

Barnard 86, NGC 6520, Inkspot Nebula

Barnard 86, NGC 6520 - "A drop of ink on the luminous sky" - E. E. Barnard

Lying roughly 6000 light-years away, the dark nebula Barnard 86 and it's close neighbor, the young star cluster NGC 6520, appear in the foreground of the intensely dense Large Sagittarius Star Cloud. Barnard 86 is classified as a Bok Globule, a dense, late stage collapsing cloud of gas & dust where new stars form. Light from background stars is blocked by the cloud.

NGC 6520 is a small, young star cluster that has likely formed from the same material as what remains in Barnard 86. There are only about 25 stars in the cluster. Several are large, young, blue-white hot stars. The cluster's age is thought to be on the order of 150 million years. As with all open clusters, NGC 6520 will disperse into the Milky Way's arms as the galaxy rotates.

The sheer number of stars visible in this image is striking. Thinking about how I might quantify the number, I did a quick thought experiment and some rough back-of-napkin math. The image field is ~0.7 degrees. Given our location ~26K light-years from the center of our galaxy, the depth of field through to the far edge of the galaxy is 80K light years. A bit of trig shows that the base of the image is 1K light-years wide. The image visualizes down through the tip of a pyramid with a 1K x 1K light-year base, and 80K light-year depth. The volume of the pyramid is 2.67x10^10 cubic light-years. Using an average separation of stars in the Milky Way of 5 light-years, the implication is that this image should contain about 215 million stars!

I wouldn't even try to count the stars in the image. Let's just say it's a LOT! Now think about all those planets around each star..... ;-)

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Barnard 86, NGC 6520, Inkspot Nebula

Barnard 86, NGC 6520, Inkspot Nebula

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Barnard 86, NGC 6520, Inkspot Nebula

Barnard 86, NGC 6520, Inkspot Nebula

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