Hubble Telescope sees a bright 'snowball' of stars in the Milky Way's neighbor (image)

An extremely starry scene in space. The center looks like a white haze, and it's where lots of the stars are congregated.

Even if dreams of a white Christmas fail to come true this year, the Hubble Space Telescope has ensured at least one snowball gets thrown during the festive season. Hubble collected data that was used to build a stunning image of a tightly bound cluster of stars that looks like a cosmic snowball. It's situated in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). 

This globular cluster, named NGC 2210 and located around 158,000 light-years from Earth, is estimated to be around 11.6 billion years old, meaning it is similar in age to other globular clusters in the LMC as well as to the oldest globular clusters located in the Milky Way's halo.