Hubble Space Telescope Chronicles Glittery Star Cluster

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Hubble Space Telescope Chronicles Glittery Star Cluster
Photo Credit: NASA

Hubble Space Telescope’s team recently published an image captured by the legendary space observatory when it set the crosshairs on the constellation Dorado in the southern sky.

 

Astronomers refer to this stellar group as NGC 1755. The open star cluster looks like “a pinch of salt strewn on a jet-black tablecloth," as per European Space Agency (ESA) representatives in a recent image caption. ESA and NASA work together to manage the Hubble telescope’s operations.

 

Earth’s Cosmic Neighbor

These glittery stars are relatively close to Earth in cosmic terms. NGC 1755 lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It is located around 200,000 light-years away from our planet.

Star clusters are basically a collection of stars that experience gravitational pull from one another, which keeps them bound together. But this particular cluster is smaller in size. NGC 1755 is an open star cluster, which means it houses generally younger stars and measures 120 light-years across.

Although open clusters usually host similar stars, ESA scientists noted that stars featuring distinct properties can exist in the same cluster.

Hubble Diving Deep Into NGC 1755

Astronomers leveraged Hubble Space Telescope’s instruments and the Large Magellanic Cloud's proximity to our planet to get a detailed look at all the different kinds of stars that can exist together in a cluster. The Pleiades is another example of an open star cluster. It lies in the constellation Taurus and has around 800 stars.

The Hubble Space Telescope which started operations three decades ago is still going strong and has been peering into far reaches of the cosmos to provide important insights to astronomers and space enthusiasts alike. The space observatory was recently revived from a glitch that rendered its science instruments offline. The last instrument returned from safe mode and started working on December 7.

Hubble Capturing Carina Nebula

Recently, the legendary space telescope moved its lenses toward a scene previously captured by its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. The space observatory captured the Carina-Sagittarius arm of the Carina nebula.

Hubble’s image showed more pastel colors in contrast to JWST’s infrared image. Although the Hubble telescope operates primarily in visible light, it used its infrared capabilities to view past the nebula's dust and capture its structure.

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