The photo shows the view as part of the Small Magellanic Cloud
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, WASHINGTON — The Hubble Space Telescope has captured this stunning view of a nearby open star cluster slowly disappearing into the surrounding dwarf galaxy. The photo shows the view as part of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy from Milky Way which is only 200 thousand light years from Earth and a couple smaller than Large Magellanic Cloud which is a little closer.
Its proximity to Earth allows us to observe it in such detail that Hubble can see relatively small clusters of stars with incredible clarity.
Reported by SpaceOn Sunday (8/1/2022), new Hubble photos, released by the United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) in December 2022, show only a small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud, an open cluster called NGC 376.
Open clusters are distinguished from globular clusters by their more open and loosely bound structure. This is what allows us to identify individual stars even in their densest regions. Globular clusters, on the other hand, are so dense that stars can be within a light-year of each other, and the light from stars in their central region converges.
Although Small Magellanic Cloud containing hundreds of millions of stars, NGC 376 is only about 3,400 times the mass of the sun. So its mass is much less than the Small Magellanic Cloud itself.
NGC 376, located in the southern celestial constellation Tucana, was first discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop.
According to a 2011 study in The Astrophysical Journal, NGC 376 has likely lost about 90 percent of its original stellar mass and is in the process of dissipating into the larger Small Magellanic Cloud. When that will happen isn’t clear, 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 surveys. Namely, one uses Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), and the other uses Hubble’s ACS and Wide Field Camera 3.
