[ad_1]
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the NGC 1898 global cluster, which nears the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.
Credit: ESA / Hubble & NASA
Wow. That's a lot of stars.
The uncountable multitudes of the global cluster NGC 1898 shine in a newly released photo by the famous Hubble Space Telescope, a joint mission of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Over the years, Hubble has made many observations of NGC 1898, a structure that was discovered by British astronomer John Herschel in 1834. NGC 1898 lies near the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy of our own Milky Way that's about 160,000 light-years from Earth. [The Hubble Space Telescope: A 25th Anniversary Photo Celebration]
"Today, we know that global clusters are", ESA officials wrote today (Oct. 22) in a description of the image.
"While we already have a pretty good picture on the global clusters of the Milky Way – still with many unanswered questions – our studies on globular clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies just started," they added. "The observations of NGC 1898 will help to determine whether they are similar to the Milky Way, or if they have different features.
0 of 10 questions complete
Star Quiz: Test Your Stellar Smarts
Though they look serene and silent from our vantage on Earth, they are actually roiling balls of violent plasma. Test your stellar smarts with this quiz.
0 of questions complete
The Hubble Space Telescope launched to Earth orbits aboard the space shuttle Discovery in April 1990. Its initial images were blurry, an issue that mission officials traced to a slight defect in the telescope's primary mirror.
Spacewalking astronauts fixed that problem in December 1993, and further maintained and upgraded Hubble on four additional servicing missions from 1997 to 2009.
On the final servicing mission, in May 2009, astronauts replaced all six of Hubble's orientation-maintaining gyroscopes. The third of those six gyros recently failed, sending the telescope into a protective "safe mode."
Hubble needs to operate at maximum efficiency, and has a backup that mission team members to behave as planned. NASA's goal is to have confidence that the iconic telescope will be back and running again soon, even if the backup does not fall into line; Hubble can operate in one-gyro mode, with a second gyro acting as a backup.
Mike Wall's book on the search for alien life, "Out There," will be published on Nov. 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published on Space.com.
[ad_2]
Source link
