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The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a breathtaking view of a distant star cluster, filled with sparkling red, white and blue stars, which were unveiled just in time for the July 4 vacation in the United States.
The image, released by NASA and the European Space Agency on July 2, shows the open star cluster NGC 330, a group of stars located about 180,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy belonging to our Milky Way, in the constellation Tucana, Toucan.
“Because star clusters are made up of a single primordial cloud of gas and dust, all the stars that contain them are roughly the same age,” NASA and ESA officials wrote in a report. Description of the image. “This makes them useful natural laboratories for astronomers to learn how stars form and evolve.”
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Astronomers used archived observations from Hubble’s Wide Field 3 camera in 2018 to create this image to support two different studies aimed at understanding how star clusters evolve and how large stars can develop before they explode into supernova.
“The most amazing thing in this image is actually the very small star cluster in the lower left corner of the image, which is surrounded by a nebula of ionized hydrogen (red) and dust (blue)” European officials from ESA said. In a separate photo description. “The cluster, named Galfor 1, was discovered in 2018 in data from the Hubble Archives, which was used to create this latest Hubble image.”
Scientists studying Galfor 1 will have to wait for the arrival of NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope (as it launches later this year) it can be monitored to determine that the surrounding nebula has a shock function of arc, added the European Space Agency.
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The bright star intersection patterns here are actually an artifact of the Hubble Telescope itself. ESA officials said they called them diffraction spikes, and they form when starlight is reflected from four rotors that support the Hubble secondary mirror.
While the Hubble vision of NGC 330 may add a bit of sparkle to those celebrating the July 4th holiday, American astronauts in space aren’t so lucky. They will work over the weekend to prepare the visiting SpaceX Dragon freighter for return to Earth on Tuesday (July 6).
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and has taken stunning photos of the universe for over 30 years. The iconic observatory is currently offline due to a computer glitch, with NASA activating a backup computer in hopes of restoring Hubble to good health.
Email Tariq Malik at [email protected] Or follow him on @tariqjmalik. Follow us on @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.
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