Hubble Telescope Discovers Celestial Fossil in Space – Teach Me About Science

This week, the Hubble Telescope captured a globular cluster of stars with celestial fossils in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

The Hubble Space Telescope, named after astronomer Edwin Hubble, was launched in the 1990s and is one of the most prominent and widely used telescopes in modern astronomy as it can obtain high-optical resolution images that orbit our planet Earth.

This week, the Hubble Telescope revealed a new image of a densely populated cluster of stars – the globular cluster – or “celestial fossil” – NGC 1841, which is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), so named because it contains very ancient stars that resemble existing fossils. On our planet Earth. Let's learn more about LMC.

According to the a pot Galaxies are collections of gas, dust, billions of stars and their solar systems, held together by the force of gravity. These shapes can be different, such as spiral, elliptical, or simply irregular. As we know, our planet is located within 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 orbiting it, one of which is the LMC Galaxy.

The LMC is a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, located 162,000 light-years away. Let's remember that satellite galaxies are connections of stars orbiting a larger galaxy due to gravity.

In this case, the LMC is the third closest galaxy to our own galaxy, the Milky Way, after the Grand Dwarf Galaxy and the Sagittarius Elliptical Dwarf Galaxy. The LMC is the largest and brightest of dozens of galaxies, representing 1% of our Galaxy, so much so that it can be viewed with the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere, of course, in a completely dark environment and without light pollution.

NASA classifies the LMC Galaxy as a barred spiral (SB) galaxy because its appearance is irregular, as it does not exhibit a ring structure, which may be due to the interaction it presents with the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies.

The LMC contains approximately 30 billion stars and is about 35,000 light-years in diameter, including a lot of gas and dust; It is rich in celestial objects and phenomena of all kinds, the most notable example of which is the Tarantula Nebula (30 Dorados, NGC 2070), the largest star-forming region in the entire Local Group.

The LMC contains a large number of globular clusters, and these celestial objects lie between open clusters, which are much less dense and closely connected, and small, compact galaxies.

These clusters provide us with information about star formation and the early evolution of life, and terrestrial fossils provide us with information about the history of our planet, providing stability and maintaining its shape as part of its characteristics for a long time. .

Although new techniques have allowed us to reveal that stellar populations and the properties of globular clusters are diverse and complex, we still do not know how these compact groups of stars form.