This glittering group of stars, shining by way of the darkness like sparks left behind by a firework, is NGC 2660 within the constellation Vela, greatest seen within the southern sky. NGC 2660 is an open cluster, a sort of star cluster that may include anyplace from tens to some a whole lot of stars loosely certain collectively by gravity.
The stars of open clusters type out of the identical area of gasoline and dust and thus share many traits, equivalent to age and chemical composition. In contrast to globular clusters—their historic, denser, and extra tightly-packed cousins—open clusters are simpler to check since astronomers can extra simply distinguish between particular person stars. Their stars will be outdated or younger, and so they could disperse after just a few million years into the spiral or irregular galaxies the place they’re born.
The spikes surrounding lots of the stars on this picture are “diffraction spikes,” which happen when the glow from shiny factors of sunshine displays off of Hubble’s secondary mirror help. The intense purple object to the left with the very outstanding diffraction spikes is a foreground star that isn’t a part of the cluster. Hubble noticed this open cluster as a part of a program to check the ages of white dwarf stars in open clusters.
Supplied by
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Quotation:
Picture: Hubble Telescope spies glowing spray of stars in NGC 2660 (2022, November 29)
retrieved 29 November 2022
from https://phys.org/information/2022-11-image-hubble-telescope-spies-spray.html
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