NGC 265 is an open cluster of stars in the southern constellation of Tucana. It is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. The cluster was discovered by English astronomer John Herschel on April 11, 1834. J. L. E. Dreyer described it as, "faint, pretty small, round", and added it as the 265th entry in his New General Catalogue.
This cluster has an angular core radius of 18″ and a physical radius of approximately 47 ly. It has a combined 4,200 times the mass of the Sun and is around 250 million years old. The metallicity of the cluster – what astronomers term the abundance of elements with higher atomic number than helium – is at around −0.62, or only 24% of that in the Sun. The turn-off mass for the cluster, when a star of that mass begins to evolve off the main sequence into a giant, is about 4.0 to 4.5 M☉.
See also
- NGC 290
References
External links
- Media related to NGC 265 at Wikimedia Commons
- ESA Hubble space telescope site: Hubble picture in information on NGC 265
- HubbleSite NewsCenter: Information on NGC 265 and the Hubble picture
- Nemiroff, R.; Bonnell, J., eds. (1 May 2006). "Open Cluster NGC 290: A Stellar Jewel Box". Astronomy Picture of the Day. NASA. Retrieved 2007-04-17.
