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The Hubble Space Telescope sheds new light on star formation in an unusually small galaxy.
JAKARTA— The Hubble Space Telescope has just provided new clues about star formation in an unusually small galaxy. NGC 1087 does not match the shape of the galaxy.
Reported Inverse, Tuesday (10/10/2023), like about two-thirds of spiral galaxies (including our galaxy), NGC 1087 has a block-shaped structure that stretches in the middle. In most barred spiral galaxies, the blocks are old environments full of graceful old stars.
But NGC 1087’s beam is bright and busy, full of young stars and developing stellar nurseries. New images from Hubble may help astronomers understand why.
This strange little galaxy gets much of its structure from dust lanes and cool, clumpy clouds of hydrogen gas— The dark red patches in this image, dotted with the brilliant pink of new stars coming to life.
Massive stars burning hot blaze blue-white among darker dust lanes. Astronomers hope this image, and the raw data behind it, can help them understand how young stars, with their intense radiation and stellar winds, influence the cool gas clouds around them.
Ultimately, images like this might also explain other oddities of NGC 1087. That is, for a galaxy whose disk extends 87,000 light years, its beam appears to be very short, and its nucleus is quite small.
Hubble observed NGC 1087 in the wavelengths of light our eyes can see, but also in the slightly longer wavelengths of infrared light (which are great for looking deep into cool clouds of gas and dust) and the slightly shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light.
To create images we can actually see, image processors at the Space Telescope Science Institute have to match specific wavelengths of infrared and ultraviolet light to colors in the visible spectrum. The process is a combination of art and science.
Source: Republic
2023-10-09 23:25:00
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