Images from the Hubble Space Telescope may bring New Year’s cheer with science.
One such case is a new photograph from the 32-year-old observatory, published on December 1. Here, Hubble Space Telescope Sees the quintessential colors of the holiday season, as bright blue-white stars shine against dusty stripes of red.
these stars are located outside Galaxyin a piece of sky located within a nearby galaxy called large magellanic cloud (LMC). As the name suggests, it looks like a round spot in the southern sky. But in reality, this celestial speck is an irregularly shaped, small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. it is roughly located 150,000 light years (opens in new tab) away from the earth. But despite this distance, Hubble is able to pick out wonderful details.
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For example, bright stars Hubble can see there. They belong to a special region within the LMC called BSDL 2757. It is an open cluster, a group of stars that are bound together by their mutual gravity. astronomers love to study star cluster Because they hold information about how stars – the most basic units of the universe – came into being. Open clusters are particularly interesting because hundreds of stars within a cluster potentially share same root (opens in new tab), That is to say, they evolved from molecular clouds similar to stars.
According to Hubble Space Telescope officials, the blue, green, and orange colors seen here are optical light. picture description (opens in new tab) Published last week. Dozens of bright stars shine in these colors that look like a rust-colored canvas.
But the red regions are not optical light. Rather, they represent information that Hubble collected in infrared wavelengths of light. these are well beyond what the human eye can see, Their value is that they display sources of heat. In this case, the red represents the interstellar dust moving around in the open cluster.
Astronomers are studying the open cluster BSDL 2757 to investigate stellar evolution.
“Researchers studied early-stage stars that are still accumulating mass from clouds,” NASA officials write in the Hubble image description.
“As gas and dust spirals toward a budding, young star, it releases ultraviolet light. By analyzing how this light interacts with dust, astronomers can better understand the properties of dust in different environments.” Huh.”
Hubble’s successor james webb space telescope (JWST or WEB). The observatory launched Christmas Day last year, and its team released its first official science data last summer. The JWST has been specifically designed to study the infrared wavelengths of the universe, and can provide scientists with more data on material visible as the red background.
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