Ahead of the 35th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have published a new image taken by it. It depicts a star factory located in a neighboring galaxy.
Pretty soon, the Hubble telescope will celebrate the 35th anniversary of its launch. In this regard, scientists have begun to publish images of objects that have been studied by the telescope in the past. New data and new image processing techniques were used to derive them.
The photograph captures the young star cluster NGC 346. While several images of NGC 346 have been published previously, this image contains new data and combines Hubble observations in the infrared, optical, and ultraviolet wavelengths for the first time.
NGC 346 is in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy located 200,000 light-years from Earth toward the constellation Tucana. It’s less rich in elements heavier than helium than our Milky Way. This makes its conditions similar to those in the early Universe.
NGC 346 contains more than 2,500 newborn stars. The most massive of them, which are many times larger than the Sun, burn with intense blue light in this image. The glowing pink nebula and snakelike dark clouds are remnants of the matter from which they were born.
Hubble’s unrivaled sensitivity and resolution have helped scientists unlock the secrets of star formation in NGC 346. Using two sets of observations taken 11 years apart, they tracked the stars’ changing positions and found that they were spiraling toward the center of the cluster. This spiraling motion is due to the flow of gas from the outer part of NGC 346, which fuels star formation in the center of the turbulent cloud.
The hot, massive stars that populate the cluster could well be compared to sculptors. They are the sources of intense radiation and powerful stellar winds that tear apart the bubbling gas of their birthplace and scatter the surrounding nebula, carving out bizarre gas-dust landscapes in it.
Earlier we reported on how Hubble unlocked the mysteries of Uranus’ atmosphere.
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