1:01 pm
Monday 19 December 2022
NASA has released new images of a 100-million-year-old globular star cluster, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
This globular cluster is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and home to billions of stars.
The cluster is located about 160,000 light-years away in the constellation Abu Saif. It includes millions of stars that are bound together by gravitational forces.
Unlike most globular clusters, the stars in NGC 1850 are relatively young. Globular clusters with young stars like NGC 1850 do not exist in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Astrophysicists believe that when the first generation of stars were born in NGC 1850, the stars spewed matter such as dust and gas into the surrounding universe.
The density of the newly formed star cluster was so high that this ejected material could not escape the cluster’s gravity, forcing it to remain nearby.
The cluster’s intense gravity also draws hydrogen and helium from its surroundings, according to phys.org.
These two sources of gas have met to form a second generation of stars, which increases the density and size of this globular cluster.
And in 2021, scientists discovered the presence of a black hole in NGC 1850. They also discovered many brighter blue stars, which burn hotter and die before the age of red stars.
There are also about 200 red giants, which are stars that have run out of hydrogen at their centers and fuse hydrogen away from their cores, causing the outer layers to expand, cool, and glow red.
Surrounding the cluster is a hazy pattern of dust and gas scattered presumably by supernova explosions.
