Hubble Looks At How Stars Could Have Formed In The Early Universe

Hubble researchers recently shared this image of a cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. This small galaxy has a different chemical composition than our galaxy and is therefore more similar to galaxies found in the early universe, so studying it can help us learn how stars were born when the universe was still young. Astronomers have been puzzled to find young stars spiraling at the center of a huge cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The outer spiral arm in this massive, oddly shaped stellar nursery — called NGC 346 — may be fueling star formation in a river-like flow of gas and stars. This is an efficient way to fuel star birth, the researchers say. NASA, ESA, A. James (STScI) The star cluster, called NGC 346, is tiny at just 150 light-years across, but it’s a particularly busy stellar nursery. This region is full of young stars, and these stars appear to form in a flowing spiral structure of gas and stars that researchers compare to a river. This could explain why the rate of star formation here is so high. “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,” study leader Elena Sabi of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore explained in a statement. “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 findings are relevant to the early universe because, like early galaxies, there are relatively few heavy elements found in the Small Magellanic Cloud. This means that the stars here burn hot and bright and die faster than stars in our galaxy. Seeing how stars are born in this cluster, where material moves in a spiral formation, helps explain what might have happened in the period two to three billion years after the Big Bang. “A spiral is really the good, natural way to feed star formation from the outside to the center of the cluster,” explained another of the researchers, Peter Zeidler of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency. “It’s the most efficient way that the stars and gas that fuel more star formation can move toward the center.”

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