File:Globular Clusters In Abell 1689.jpg
The monochromatic view at right, taken at visible wavelengths, zooms into the region packed with globular clusters. They appear as thousands of tiny white dots, which look like a blizzard of snowflakes. The larger white blobs are entire galaxies of stars.
Globular clusters, dense collections of hundreds of thousands of stars, are the homesteaders of galaxies, containing some of the oldest surviving stars in the universe. Almost 95 percent of globular cluster formation occurred within the first 1 billion or 2 billion years after our universe was born in the big bang 13.7 billion years ago.
Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys snapped these images from June 12 to 21, 2002, and between May 29 and July 8, 2010.