NASA has released new images of a 100-million-year-old globular star cluster about 160,000 light-years away in the constellation Swordfish, according to RT.
And while the new images from the Hubble Space Telescope may look startlingly different, they’re actually images of the same cosmic body called NGC 1850.
Although both images were taken by the same Hubble instrument, different filters with different custom colors were used to study specific wavelengths of light emitted by these objects.
The blue-blurred image includes some near-infrared light along with visible light (what our human eyes can detect), while the red-blurred image covers a much wider range from the near-ultraviolet to the infrared spectrum. primordial infrared.
Observations in the ultraviolet are ideal for detecting the light from hotter, dimmer stars, as seen in this bright starscape.
This globular cluster, which is 100 million years old, is found in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way home to billions of stars.
The cluster is located about 160,000 light-years away in the constellation Swordfish. Like other globular clusters of galaxies, NGC 1850 is a densely packed globular cluster of stars bound together by each other’s gravity.
Unlike most globular clusters, the stars in NGC 1850 are relatively young, and in our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are no globular clusters with stars as young as NGC 1850.
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 intense gravity of the cluster draws hydrogen and helium from its surroundings.
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.
The cluster is surrounded by a pattern of haze, diffuse dust and gas thought to come from supernova explosions (blue veil-like structures in the first image and red in the second).
NGC 1850’s mass is about 63,000 times the mass of the Sun, and its inner core is about 20 light-years in diameter.
Astronomers used observations from the Hubble Space Telescope over a wide range of wavelengths to view this large star cluster and learn more about star formation.
