Hubble Space Telescope delivers holiday sparkle in new image
Images from the Hubble Space Telescope can bring New Year’s cheer with science.
One such case is a new image from the 32-year-old observatory, published Dec. 1. Hubble Space Telescope sees the typical colors of the holiday season as bright blue-white stars sparkle against dusty, red-shaded bands.
These stars are outside the Milky Wayin a patch of sky in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). As the name suggests, it looks like a round spot in the southern sky. But in fact, this celestial smear is an irregularly shaped, small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It is located approx 150,000 light years (opens in new tab) away from the earth. But despite this distance, Hubble can discern fantastic detail.
Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!
Take, for example, the glittering stars that Hubble can see there. They belong to a specific area within the GMW called BSDL 2757. It is an open cluster, a group of stars loosely held together by their mutual gravitational pull. Astronomers like to study star clusters because they contain information about how stars – the most basic units of the cosmos – form. Open star clusters are particularly interesting because the hundreds of stars within one cluster are likely to same origin (opens in new tab). That is, they evolved from the same molecular cloud of stardust.
The blue, green and orange colors seen here are optical light, according to Hubble Space Telescope officials in the Image description (opens in new tab) published last week. Dozens of bright stars sparkle in these hues against what appears to be a rust-colored canvas.
But the red areas are not optical light. Rather, they represent information Hubble collected in infrared wavelengths of light. These are just beyond what human eyes can see. Their value is that they show heat sources. In this case, the red represents interstellar dust floating in the open star cluster.
Astronomers study the open star cluster BSDL 2757 to investigate the evolution of stars.
“The researchers studied early-stage growing stars that are still gathering mass from the clouds that envelop them,” NASA officials write in the Hubble image description.
“As gas and dust spiral toward a nascent young star, ultraviolet light is released. By analyzing how this light interacts with dust, astronomers can better understand the dust’s properties in different environments.”
Hubble’s successor is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb). The observatory launched on Christmas Day last year, and the team released its first official science data last summer. Designed specifically to study the infrared wavelengths of the universe, JWST may provide scientists with more data on the material that appears here as the red background.
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