The NASA-ESA Hubble telescope, even during its final years, continues to offer new insights into the history of our universe with a new image that it produced recently. The revered telescope has captured a spiral of young stars at the centre of a massive cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Astronomers believe that the outer arm of the spiral (as shown in the image below) in this oddly shaped stellar nursery — called NGC 346 — may be feeding star formation.
4/ NGC 346’s intriguing shape and rapid star formation rate have puzzled astronomers. It took the combined power of the @HUBBLE_space and @ESO ‘s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to unravel the mysteries of this stellar nesting ground. pic.twitter.com/QKFZtj0brZ
— HUBBLE (@HUBBLE_space) September 8, 2022
Interestingly, this NGC 346 is roughly 150 light-years in diameter but boasts the mass of 50,000 suns. Moreover, the stars in this region have been found to be moving at an average velocity of 3,200 kilometres per hour, which means that in 11 years they move 320 million kilometres (about twice the distance between the sun and the Earth).
Why is it significant?
According to a report by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Small Magellanic Cloud is similar to the galaxies which are found in the younger part of the universe. In comparison to the Milky Way, it has a simpler composition and fewer heavier elements, which results in its stars having higher temperatures and running out of fuel relatively earlier. Lying roughly 2,00,000 light-years away, the Small Magellanic Cloud is also one of our closest galactic neighbours and thus an excellent candidate to learn more about the early universe.
According to scientists, learning more about this satellite galaxy might reveal new information about a firestorm of star birth that may have occurred when the universe was just two to three billion years old. “Stars are the machines that sculpt the universe. We would not have life without stars, and yet we don’t fully understand how they form,” explained study leader Elena Sabbi of the Space Telescope Science Institute.
“We have several models that make predictions, and some of these predictions are contradictory. We want to determine what is regulating the process of star formation because these are the laws that we need to also understand what we see in the early universe”, Sabbi added in an official statement. In the following days, astronomers will carry out observations again using the James Webb Space Telescope to measure the motion of the low-mass stars and learn more about this star-studded part of the galaxy.
