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The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning view of a distant star cluster, filled with sparkling red, white and blue stars, which were unveiled 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 cluster of stars about 180,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy dwarf belonging to our Milky Way, in the constellation Tucana, the Toucan. .
“Because star clusters are formed from a single primordial cloud of gas and dust, all the stars they contain are approximately the same age,” NASA and United States officials wrote. in a press release. 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 Camera 3 in 2018 to create this image to support two different studies aimed at understanding how star clusters evolve and how large stars can evolve before they explode in a supernova.
“The most amazing thing in this image is actually the very small star cluster in the lower left corner of the image, surrounded by a nebula of ionized hydrogen (red) and dust (blue),” said ESA officials said. In a separate photo description. “The cluster, which was named Galfor 1, was discovered in 2018 in data from the Hubble Archives, which was used to create the last Hubble image.”
Scientists studying Galfor 1 will have to wait for news from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (as it launches later this year), it can monitor it to determine that the surrounding nebula has an arc shock function, added the European Space Agency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch؟v=tMlPUft-8CY
The bright star intersection patterns here are actually an artifact of the Hubble Telescope itself. ESA officials said they are called diffraction peaks and form when starlight is reflected from four rotors that support the Hubble secondary mirror.
While Hubble’s view on 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 for its 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 Symbolic Observatory is currently offline due to a computer glitch, with NASA scrambling to activate a back-up computer in the hopes of getting Hubble back 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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