About this object
Globular clusters are tightly packed agglomerations of hundreds of
thousands of stars. They have a spherical shape and are themselves
distributed in a spherical halo around our Galaxy, the Milky Way.
M15 (NGC 7078) is an excellent example in the constellation Pegasus.
It actually covers a region more than three times the extent seen in
this image.
There is a significant central light excess in M15, over and above the
brightness that would be expected from the normal dynamical models of
globular clusters. An early suggestion that this cusp could be caused
by a few thousand solar mass black hole seems less likely in the light of
high resolution observations by the Hubble Space Telescope,
although no final verdict is yet agreed upon by all researchers.
Location: 21 30.1 +12 10 (2000.0), distance: about 34000 light years.