Family members don’t always stay close together – they can be separated by thousands of miles. But one member of the Milky Way Galaxy’s family takes the separation to extremes. It’s 300,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy – one of the most distant residents of the Milky Way yet seen.

NGC 2419 is a globular cluster – a group of about a million stars. They form a dense ball a few hundred light-years across.

Any star near the middle of the cluster would have thousands of neighbors within a few light-years. Compare that to our own neighborhood – only three stars reside less than five light-years from the Sun.

NGC 2419 is one of the Milky Way’s oldest family members. The cluster was born more than 12 billion years ago – not long after the galaxy itself. All of its big, bright stars burned out long ago. So almost all of the remaining stars are much less massive than the Sun.

The cluster follows a highly stretched-out orbit around the center of the Milky Way. That’s led to suggestions that it was born elsewhere, then captured by the Milky Way. But there’s no confirmation of that idea. So NGC 2419 is still considered a far-away relative of the rest of the Milky Way.

The cluster is in the uber-faint constellation Lynx, which is in the east-northeast at nightfall. NGC 2419 is an easy target for just about any telescope.

Script by Damond Benningfield