The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a dazzling view of a distant star cluster, one filled with stars that sparkle in red, white and blue, unveiled just in time for the Fourth of July U.S. holiday.
The photo, which NASA and the European Space Agency released July 2, shows the open star cluster NGC 330, a group of stars located about 180,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way, in the constellation Tucana, the Toucan.
"Because star clusters form from a single primordial cloud of gas and dust, all the stars they contain are roughly the same age," NASA and ESA officials wrote in an image description. "This makes them useful natural laboratories for astronomers to learn how stars form and evolve."
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Astronomers used archived observations from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in 2018 to create this image to support two different studies aimed at understanding how star clusters evolve and how large stars can grow before they explode as supernovas.
"The most stunning object in this image is actually the very small star cluster in the lower left corner of the image, surrounded by a nebula of ionised hydrogen (red) and dust (blue)," ESA officials said in a separate image description. " Named Galfor 1, the cluster was discovered in 2018 in Hubble's archival data, which was used to create this latest image from Hubble."
Scientists studying Galfor 1 will have to wait until NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope (while will launch later this year) can observe it to determine its surrounding nebula has a bow shock feature, ESA added.
The criss-cross patterns of the brilliant stars here are actually an artifact of Hubble itself. They're called diffraction spikes and form when starlight reflects off the four vanes supporting Hubble's secondary mirror, ESA officials said.
While Hubble's view of NGC 330 may add some sparkle to those celebrating the Fourth of July holiday, American astronauts in space have no such luck. They'll be working through the holiday weekend to prepare a visiting SpaceX Dragon cargo ship for its return to Earth on Tuesday (July 6).
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and captured stunning photos of the universe for over 30 years. The iconic observatory is currently offline due to a computer glitch, with NASA working to activate a backup computer in the hopes of restoring Hubble to good health.
Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.
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