This week, Hubble captured a globular cluster of celestial fossil stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).
The Hubble Space Telescope, named in honor of astronomer Edwin Hubble, was launched in the 1990s and is one of the most important and widely used telescopes in modern astronomy because it can acquire high optical resolution images orbiting our planet Earth.
This week, the Hubble Telescope revealed a new image of the densely populated group of stars that is the globular cluster—or “celestial fossil”—NGC 1841, which is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), so named because it contains very old stars that resemble the fossils found on our planet earth. Let’s learn more about LMC.
According to NASA, galaxies are collections of gas, dust, and billions of stars and their solar systems held together by gravitational force. These can have different shapes, for example spiral or elliptical, or simply irregular. As we know, our planet is located in a galaxy called the Milky Way, which has a spiral shape. The Milky Way has close companions such as the Andromeda Galaxy and some galaxies that orbit it, one of which is the LMC.
The LMC is a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, located 162,000 light-years away. Recall that satellite galaxies are collections of stars that orbit a larger galaxy due to gravitational attraction.
In this case, the LMC is the third closest galaxy to our own, the Milky Way, after Canis Major Dwarf and Sagittarius Elliptical Dwarf. The LMC is the largest and brightest of dozens of galaxies, representing 1% of our galaxy, so much so that it can be seen with the naked eye in the southern hemisphere, of course in total darkness and without light pollution.
NASA classifies the LMC as a barred (SB) spiral galaxy because its appearance is irregular as it does not show a ring structure, which may be due to the interaction it presents with the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies.
The LMC contains about 30 billion stars and is about 35,000 light-years across, which includes a lot of gas and dust; It is rich in objects and celestial phenomena of all kinds, the most obvious example being the Tarantula Nebula (30 Doradus, NGC 2070), the largest star-forming region in the entire Local Group.
The LMC contains a large number of globular clusters, these celestial bodies are located between open clusters, much less dense and tightly connected, and small compact galaxies.
These star clusters provide us with information about the formation of stars and the early development of life, just as terrestrial fossils provide us with information about the history of our planet, representing the stability and maintenance of its shape as part of its characteristics. .
Despite new technologies that have allowed us to reveal that the stellar populations and characteristics of globular clusters are diverse and complex, we still do not know how these tightly packed groups of stars form.
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