Posted: 19:59, September 9, 2022 | Updated: 20:00, 9 September 2022
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning spiral star formation at the center of the stellar nursery located 200,000 light-years from Earth.
The young stars can be seen spiraling into the center of a huge star cluster known as NGC 346 located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way and one of our closest galactic neighbors.
Researchers using the power of Hubble and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope say the spiral’s outer arm could be fueling star formation in a river-like movement of gas and stars.
The unique shape of the stellar nursery has long puzzled astronomers. NGC 346 also boasts the mass of 50,000 Suns. To put this in context, the sun is big enough to fit about 1.3 million Earths inside.
It took the combined power of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to reveal the behavior of this mysterious-looking stellar nesting ground.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning spiral star formation at the center of the stellar nursery located 200,000 light-years from Earth
The study examines the changes in the positions of the stars over an 11-year period. Stars move at an average speed of 2,000 miles per hour, so in that amount of time they travel an astonishing 200 million miles.
Since the cluster is further away, the researchers’ observations were only possible because of Hubble’s higher resolution and sensitivity — plus its three-decade history of scanning the universe.
“Stars are the machines that sculpt the universe. We wouldn’t have life without stars, and yet we don’t fully understand how they form,” said study leader Elena Sabi of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
“We have a lot of models making predictions and some of those predictions are contradictory. We want to determine what regulates the star formation process, because these are the laws we need to also understand what we see in the early universe.’
The unique shape of the stellar nursery has long puzzled astronomers. NGC 346 also boasts the mass of 50,000 Suns. To put this in context, the sun is big enough to fit about 1.3 million Earths inside
NASA’s Hubble Telescope was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, and deployed into orbit the next day. NASA hopes it will continue to provide fruitful data for scientists well into the 2020s
“A spiral is really the good, natural way to feed star formation from the outside to the center of the cluster,” Zeidler explained. “It’s the most efficient way that stars and gas that fuel more star formation can move toward the center.”
A second team used the ground-based VLT Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument to measure radial velocity – which tells us whether an object is approaching or moving away from an observer.
Half of the Hubble data for this study, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal on September 8, is archival.
Although the original observations were made 11 years ago, researchers recently repeated them.
“The Hubble archive really is a gold mine,” Sabbi said. “There are so many interesting star-forming regions that Hubble has observed over the years. Since Hubble performs so well, we can actually repeat these observations. This can really advance our understanding of star formation.”
Scientists expect that observations from the James Webb Space Telescope – which is bigger and more powerful than Hubble and just released its first images in July – will be able to analyze some of the less massive stars in the cluster.
NASA’s Hubble Telescope was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, and deployed into orbit the next day. NASA hopes it will continue to provide fruitful data for scientists well into the 2020s.
Hubble orbits Earth at an altitude of about 340 miles (547 kilometers). It travels at about 17,000 miles per hour (27,300 kilometers per hour) and takes about 95 minutes to complete one orbit around Earth.
Hubble orbits Earth at an altitude of about 340 miles (547 kilometers). It travels at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hour (27,300 kilometers per hour) and takes about 95 minutes to complete one orbit around Earth
