AI overview
Messier 75 is a spherical collection of hundreds of thousands of old stars bound together by gravity, located about 67,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. It's one of the densest known globular clusters, making it valuable for astronomers studying how stars age and interact in crowded stellar environments.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Key facts
- Class
- I
- Constellation
- Sagittarius
- Right ascension
- 20 06 04.85
- Declination
- −21 ° 55 ′ 17.85 ″
- Distance
- 68 kly (20.9 kpc )
- Apparent dimensions v
- 6.8 ′
- Absolute magnitude
- −8.57
- Radius
- 67 ly
- Tidal radius
- 5.7 ′
- Metallicity
- [ Fe/H ] = −1.29 dex
- Other designations
- GCl 116, M75, NGC 6864
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
Messier 75 or M75, also known as NGC 6864, is a globular cluster of stars in the southern constellation Sagittarius. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1780 and included in Charles Messier's catalog of comet-like objects that same year.
M75 is about 67,500 light years away from Earth and is 14,700 light years away from, and on the opposite side of, the Galactic Center. Its apparent size on the sky translates to a true radius of 67 light years. M75 is classified as class I, meaning it is one of the more densely concentrated globular clusters known. It shows a slow rotation around an axis that is inclined along a position angle of −15°±30°. The absolute magnitude of M75 is about −8.5, equating to 180,000 times more luminous than the Sun (L☉).