01:01 PM
Monday, December 19, 2022
NASA has published new images of a 100-million-year-old globular star cluster, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
This globular cluster is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and home to billions of stars.
The cluster is about 160,000 light-years away in the constellation Abu Saif. It includes millions of stars that are bound together by gravitational forces.
Unlike most globular clusters, the stars of NGC 1850 are relatively young. Globular clusters with young stars such as NGC 1850 do not exist in our Milky Way galaxy.
Astrophysicists believe that when the first generation of stars was born in NGC 1850, the stars spewed matter such as dust and gas into the surrounding universe.
The density of the newly formed star cluster was so high that this ejected material could not escape the cluster’s gravity, causing it to remain nearby.
The cluster’s intense gravity also pulls hydrogen and helium gas from its surroundings, according to phys.org.
These two gas sources met to form a second generation of stars, which increases the density and size of this globular cluster.
And in 2021, scientists discovered the presence of a black hole in NGC 1850. They also discovered many brighter blue stars, which burn hotter and die at a younger age than the age of red stars.
There are also about 200 red giants, which are stars that have run out of hydrogen in their centers and fuse hydrogen away from their cores, causing the outer layers to expand, cool and glow red.
A hazy pattern surrounds the cluster, scattered dust and gas presumably from supernova explosions.