Images from the Hubble Space Telescope can bring happiness in the New Year with science.
One such case is a new photo of the 32-year-old observatory, released on Dec. 1. here Hubble Space Telescope He sees the perfect colors for the holiday season, as blue and white stars sparkle against red-tinged expanses.
These stars fall Milky WayIn a piece of sky located in 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 spot is a small, irregularly shaped satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. fall approx 150,000 light years away (Opens in a new tab) away from the Earth. But despite this distance, Hubble is able to discern great details.
Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images ever!
Take, for example, the twinkling stars that Hubble can see there. It belongs to a particular region within the LMC, called BSDL 2757. It is an open cluster, a set of stars loosely bound together by their mutual gravitational attraction. Astronomers love to study star cluster Because they contain information about how stars appeared – the basic units of the universe. Open clusters are particularly interesting because hundreds of stars are likely to be involved in a cluster Same origin (Opens in a new tab). That is, they evolved from the same molecular cloud of stellar objects.
The blue, green and orange colors seen here are optical light, according to Hubble Space Telescope officials image description (Opens in a new tab) Released last week. Dozens of bright stars twinkle in these shadows against what looks like a russet canvas.
But the red areas are not optical light. Instead, they represent information collected by Hubble in the infrared wavelengths of light. and this is Just above what human eyes can see. Their advantage is that they highlight the heat sources. In this case, the red color represents interstellar dust floating in the open cluster.
Astronomers study the open cluster BSDL 2757 to study the evolution of stars.
“Researchers have been studying early-stage accretion stars that are still accumulating mass from surrounding clouds,” NASA officials wrote describing the Hubble image.
“As gas and dust travel towards a young star, it emits ultraviolet light. By analyzing how this light interacts with dust, astronomers can better understand the properties of dust in different environments.”
Hubble’s successor James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb). The observatory was launched at Christmas last year and his team released its first official scientific data last summer. JWST was specifically designed to study the infrared wavelengths of the universe and could provide scientists with more data on the materials shown here in the red background.
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