Despite the absence of a white Christmas this year, the Hubble Space Telescope has ensured that the festive season still includes a snowball, albeit a cosmic one. By collecting data, Hubble has contributed to the creation of a breathtaking image depicting a tightly bound cluster of stars resembling a snowball in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

This particular globular cluster, known as NGC 2210, resides approximately 158,000 light-years away from Earth and is estimated to be around 11.6 billion years old. Consequently, it shares a similar age with other globular clusters in the LMC and the oldest globular clusters found in the Milky Way’s halo.

Ironically, despite being just 2.2 billion years younger than the universe itself, NGC 2210 is considered one of the more youthful LMC globular clusters observed by astronomers. Its discovery dates back to a 2017 research campaign that utilized some of the data employed in the creation of the current image.

During the same round of observations, astronomers identified other clusters that were even older than NGC 2210. In fact, four of these clusters appeared to be over 13 billion years old, indicating that they formed a mere few hundred million years after the Big Bang.