47 Tucanae

47 Tucanae — star cluster, explore its interactive 3D model in Cosmoscope.

Explore 47 Tucanae in an interactive 3D star cluster. Fly among its real Gaia member stars, each placed at its catalogued position.

A dense ball of ancient stars beside the Small Magellanic Cloud in the southern sky, second only to Omega Centauri in brightness. Its core is so crowded that stars sometimes collide, and it hosts more than two dozen millisecond pulsars.

Type

Globular cluster — second only to Omega Centauri in brightness

Distance

14,700 light-years

Age

~12 billion years

Stars

107,056 Gaia members shown · more than a million in all

Mass

~850,000 Suns

Shown here

Each star at its Gaia sky position (Vasiliev & Baumgardt 2021)

Depths

Illustrative: each star is set along its sightline by the cluster’s measured density profile

Soft glow

Illustrative: the crowded core’s light that Gaia cannot separate into stars — the measured brightness profile minus the stars shown

Explore 47 Tucanae in 3D

47 Tucanae is placed in three-dimensional space using catalogue coordinates and an adopted astronomical distance. Rotate and zoom to explore the model. Stellar surfaces, gas structure and dust depths may be reconstructed or illustrative, as described in its facts; this is not live imagery from a telescope.