Westerlund 2, a giant cluster of 3,000 stars, resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29.
The Hubble Space Telescope pierced through the dusty veil shrouding the stellar nursery by observing near-infrared light, giving astronomers a clear view of the nebula and the dense concentration of stars in the central cluster. The cluster measures between 6 to 13 light-years across.
The giant star cluster is only about 2 million years old and contains some of our galaxy's hottest, brightest, and most massive stars. Some of its heftiest stars unleash torrents of ultraviolet light and hurricane-force winds of charged particles that etch at the enveloping hydrogen gas cloud.
When the stellar winds hit dense walls of gas, the shockwaves may spark a new wave of star birth along the wall of the cavity. The red dots scattered throughout the landscape are a rich population of newly forming stars still wrapped in their gas-and-dust cocoons. These tiny, faint stars are between 1 million and 2 million years old — relatively young stars — that have not yet ignited the hydrogen in their cores. The brilliant blue stars seen throughout the image are mostly foreground stars.
Because the cluster is very young — in astronomical terms — it has not had time to disperse its stars deep into interstellar space, providing astronomers with an opportunity to gather information on how the cluster formed by studying it within its star-birthing environment.
For more information, visit: hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2020/news-2020-15?n...
Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team
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Located in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin), around 50 million light-years from Earth, the galaxy NGC 4535 is truly a stunning sight to behold. Despite the incredible quality of this image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, NGC 4535 has a hazy, somewhat ghostly, appearance when viewed from a smaller telescope. This led amateur astronomer Leland S. Copeland to nickname NGC 4535 the “Lost Galaxy” in the 1950s.
The bright colors in this image aren’t just beautiful to look at, as they actually tell us about the population of stars within this barred spiral galaxy. The bright blue-ish colors, seen nestled amongst NGC 4535’s long, spiral arms, indicate the presence of a greater number of younger and hotter stars. In contrast, the yellower tones of this galaxy’s bulge suggest that this central area is home to stars which are older and cooler.
This galaxy was studied as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) survey, which aims to clarify many of the links between cold gas clouds, star formation, and the overall shape and other properties of galaxies.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
For more information, visit: esahubble.org/images/potw2103a/
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Tags: NGC 4535 Spiral Galaxy NASA Hubble ESA Hubble Space Telescope telescope space telescope cosmos universe space cosmic astronomy galaxy galaxies Lost Galaxy
Astronomers are using the Hubble Space Telescope to study auroras — stunning light shows in a planet's atmosphere — on the poles of the largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter.
The auroras were photographed during a series of Hubble Space Telescope far-ultraviolet-light observations taking place as NASA's Juno spacecraft approached and entered into orbit around Jupiter in 2016. The aim of the program was to determine how Jupiter's auroras respond to changing conditions in the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emitted from the Sun.
Auroras form when charged particles in the space surrounding the planet are accelerated to high energies along the planet's magnetic field. When the particles hit the atmosphere near the magnetic poles, they cause it to glow like gases in a fluorescent light fixture.
For more information, visit: hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2016-24
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Nichols (University of Leicester);
Acknowledgment: A. Simon (NASA/GSFC) and the OPAL team
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In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope spent 10 straight days in a unique experiment, staring at a dark, seemingly empty patch of sky ― about the size of a pinhead held at arm's length ― near the Big Dipper. The goal was to see what, if anything, could be found there.
The result was astounding: a collection of thousands of galaxies in various stages of evolution, a glimpse back in space and time that revealed a universe full of previously unrevealed wonders. The light from some of the farthest galaxies in the image traveled for 10 billion years to reach Earth.
The field is a very small sample of the heavens, but it represents the typical distribution of galaxies in space. The number of galaxies visible in this image, originally estimated at 1,500, was later found to be around 3,000.
Hubble took 342 exposures using different filters to create this image, which launched a series of deep field images that would reach farther and farther toward the horizon of the universe.
Credit: R. Williams (STScI), the Hubble Deep Field Team and NASA/ESA
For more information, visit: hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1996/news-1996-01.html
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This Hubble Space Telescope image captures two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging.
The 30 Doradus nebula, also widely known as the Tarantula Nebula, is approximately 170,000 light-years from Earth. It is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a galactic satellite of the Milky Way Galaxy. What at first was thought to be only one cluster in the core of this massive star-forming region has been found to be a composite of two clusters that differ in age by about one million years.
The entire 30 Doradus complex has been an active star-forming region for 25 million years, and it is currently unknown how much longer this region can continue creating new stars. Smaller systems that merge into larger ones could help to explain the origin of some of the largest known star clusters.
For more information, visit: hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2009/news-2009-32.html
For Hubble's infrared view of this region, which pierces layers of gas and dust to reveal even more stars, see hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2009/32/2655-Image.h...
Credit: NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O'Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee
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Tags: 30 Doradus star cluster stars NASA Hubble Space Telescope space astronomy cosmos Hubble Large Magellanic Cloud LMC Tarantula Nebula star-forming region