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Messier 70 is a spherical collection of hundreds of thousands of old stars held together by gravity, located about 29,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. It is one of the many globular clusters that orbit around our Milky Way galaxy and helps astronomers understand the structure and history of our galaxy.
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Encyclopedic overview
Messier 70 or M70, also known as NGC 6681, is a globular cluster of stars to be found in the south of Sagittarius. It was discovered by Charles Messier in 1780. The famous comet Hale–Bopp was discovered near this cluster in 1995.
It is about 29,400 light years away from Earth and around 6,500 light-years from the Galactic Center. It is roughly the same size and luminosity as its neighbour in space, M69. M70 has a very small core radius of 0.22 ly (0.068 pc) and a half-light radius of 182.0 ly (55.80 pc). This cluster has undergone core collapse, leaving it centrally concentrated with the luminosity distribution following a power law.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Messier 70” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.