Messier 12 (M12)

Common Name: Gumball Globular

Also Known as: NGC 6218

Object Type: Globular Cluster

Constellation: Ophiuchus

Distance from Earth: 15,700 light years

Apparent Magnitude: 7.68

Coordinates: RA 16H 47M 14.18S DEC -01deg 56 min 54.7 sec

Actual Size: 75 light years in diameter.

Apparent Dimensions: 16 arc minutes.

Discovered by: The cluster was discovered by Charles Messier on May 30, 1764. Messier added the object to his catalogue, describing it as a “nebula without stars.” William Herschel was the first to resolve the cluster into individual stars.

Description: M12 contains about 200,000 stars and is about 12.67 billion years old. It is rather loosely packed for a globular and was once thought to be a tightly concentrated open cluster. M12 is close to the brighter globular cluster M10.
Messier 12 has a Shapley-Sawyer classification of IX since member stars are concentrated relatively loosely toward the center for a globular cluster.
Compared to its neighbor Messier 10, M12 is notably less dense toward the central region.
In 2006, M12 was discovered to contain a surprisingly low number of low mass stars. Scientists believe that these stars were stripped from M12 by the gravitational pull of the Milky Way Galaxy and that the cluster lost four times as many members as it still has over its lifetime.
In other words, as the cluster’s orbit took it through the denser regions of the Milky Way plane, M12 ejected about a million stars into the galaxy’s halo. This explains why there are hardly any M-class (red) dwarfs in the cluster.
It will take another 4.5 billion years before M12 dissociates completely.

Click Below Image(s) for Full Size:

Messier 12 is invisible to the naked eye, but can be seen with binoculars in good conditions, with clear dark skies and no light pollution.
The Gumball Globular appears as a fuzzy ball of light in a small 3-inch telescope, while 8-inch instruments reveal the cluster’s brightest stars. Larger telescopes show stars across the entire area of the cluster.
Stars in the cluster can be resolved with an 8-inch or larger telescope. A 10-inch instrument reveals the core with a diameter of 3 arc minutes and a halo of stars stretching across an area of 10 arc minutes.

Messier 12 is best seen in the months of May, June and July.

Platesolve

M12 Globular Cluster

Imaging Details
Click to Return to Home Page