Hubble Space Telescope captures beautiful image of nearby star cluster
A dazzling new image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures a stunning view of a nearby open cluster of stars slowly dissolving into the dwarf galaxy that surrounds it.
The photo shows part of the Small Magellanic Clouda dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way that’s only 200,000 light-years from Earth and the smaller partner of the slightly closer Large Magellanic Cloud, also a neighboring dwarf galaxy. Its proximity allows us to observe it in such detail that the Hubble Space Telescope can see a relatively small collection of stars with remarkable clarity.
The new Hubble photo, which NASA and the European Space Agency released in December 2022, shows only a small part of the Small Magellanic Cloud – an open cluster called NGC 376. An open cluster is distinguished from a globular cluster by its more open, loosely bound structure, it allows us to identify individual stars, even in the densest regions. Globular clusters, on the other hand, are so dense that stars may be within a single light-year of each other and the light from the stars in their central regions mixes.
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While the Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, NGC 376 is only about 3,400 stars. solar masses, so it is considerably less massive than the Small Magellanic Cloud itself. Located in the southern constellation of Tucana, NGC 376 was first discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop.
According to a 2011 study in The Astrophysical Journal, NGC 376 has probably lost about 90% of its original stellar mass and is dissolving into the wider Small Magellanic Cloud. When that will happen is not clear, but the slow loss of star-forming gas and the gravitational pull of the rest of the Small Magellanic Cloud make the process inevitable.
The Hubble image was created using data from two surveys – one using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and another using both the ACS and Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.
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