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A dazzling new image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures a stunning view of a nearby open cluster of stars slowly melting into the dwarf galaxy around it.
The image shows part of Small Magellanic Clouda dwarf galaxy Milky Way Which is only 200,000 light-years from Earth and Partner Minor to the slightly closer Large Magellanic Cloud, also a neighboring dwarf galaxy. Its close proximity allows us to observe it in such great detail that it makes Hubble Space Telescope You can see a relatively small star cluster with remarkable clarity.
the New Hubble images, released by NASA and the European Space Agency in December 2022, shows only a small part of the Small Magellanic Cloud – an open cluster called NGC 376. The open cluster is distinguished from the globular cluster by its more open and unconstrained structure, which allows us to identify individual stars even in their most dense regions. . In contrast, globular clusters are very dense stars They can be within 1 light-year of each other and the starlight in their central regions gets mixed together.
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Although the Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, NGC 376 is only about 3,400. solar masses, so it is much less massive than the Small Magellanic Cloud itself. Located in the southern sky constellation Tucana, NGC 376 was first discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop.
According to a 2011 study in Astrophysical JournalNGC 376 has likely lost about 90% of its original stellar mass and is on its way to decaying into the larger Small Magellanic Cloud. It’s not clear when that will happen, but the slow loss of star-forming gas and the gravitational pull of the rest of the Small Magellanic Cloud make the process inevitable.
The Hubble image was produced using data from two probes – one using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the other using both ACS and Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.
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