4/ NGC 346’s interesting shape and rapid rate of star formation have puzzled astronomers. It took the combined power of @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 about 150 light-years across, but boasts the mass of 50,000 Suns. In addition, the stars in this region have been found to move at an average speed of 3,200 kilometers per hour, which means that in 11 years they move 320 million kilometers (about twice the distance between the sun and the Earth).
Why is it important?
According to a report by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Small Magellanic Cloud is similar to galaxies found in the younger part of the universe. Compared to the Milky Way, it has a simpler composition and fewer heavier elements, causing its stars to have higher temperatures and run out of fuel relatively earlier. Located about 2,00,000 light-years away, the Small Magellanic Cloud is also one of our closest galactic neighbors and therefore an excellent candidate for learning more about the early universe. According to scientists, learning more about this satellite galaxy may reveal new information about a storm of star birth that may have occurred when the universe was only two to three billion years old. “Stars are the engines that sculpt the universe. We wouldn’t have life without stars, and yet we don’t fully understand how they form,” explained study leader Elena Sabi of the Space Telescope Science Institute. “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,” Sabbi added in an official statement. In the coming days, astronomers will take observations again using the James Webb Space Telescope to measure the motion of low-mass stars and learn more about this star-studded part of the galaxy.
