The Hubble Space Telescope delivers holiday glamor in a new image
Images from the Hubble Space Telescope can offer New Year’s cheer with science.
One such case is a new image from a 32-year-old observatory, published December 1. here , Hubble Space Telescope He sees the perfect colors for the holiday season, with bright blue and white stars sparkling against dusty red-shaded expanses.
These stars fall out Milky Wayin a patch of sky located within a nearby galaxy called Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). As the name suggests, it looks like a round smudge in the southern sky. But in fact, this heavenly smear is a small, irregularly shaped galaxy belonging to the Milky Way. fall approx 150,000 light years away (Opens in a new tab) away from Earth. But despite this distance, Hubble is able to provide impressive detail.
Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope pictures of all time!
Take, for example, the twinkling stars that Hubble can see out there. It belongs to a particular region within the LMC, called BSDL 2757. It is an open cluster, a collection of stars loosely bound together by their mutual gravitational attraction. Astronomers love to study star clusters Because they contain information about how stars appeared – the basic units in the universe. Open clusters are particularly interesting because hundreds of stars within a single cluster are likely to be involved 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) Posted last week. Dozens of bright stars shine in these shadows against what looks like a rust-colored canvas.
But the red areas are not optical light. Instead, they represent information collected by Hubble in infrared wavelengths of light. and this is Just above what human eyes can see. Their value is that they expose heat sources. In this case, red represents interstellar dust roaming the open cluster.
Astronomers study the open cluster BSDL 2757 to investigate the evolution of stars.
“The researchers studied young accretion stars that are still gathering mass from the clouds that surround them,” NASA officials wrote in describing the Hubble image.
“As gas and dust orbit toward 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 launched on Christmas Day last year, and its team released its first official science data last summer. Designed specifically to study infrared wavelengths of the universe, the JWST could give scientists more data about the materials shown here as a red background.
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