Before the US called it a night and while the rest of the world was snuggled cosily in their beds, scrolling idly through social media, National Aeronautics and Space Administration treated netizens to a dreamy picture of a cluster of stars from our very own Milky Way. The image of the globular cluster NGC 1805 was taken by the NASA’s Space Telescope, Hubble and was found to be located near the edge of a satellite galaxy of Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Taking to its social media handle, NASA shared the dreamy picture featuring many colourful stars packed close together with their striking colour difference beautifully illustrated. Promising a feeling of refreshing tranquility, the space agency gave us all the escapism we need this weekend through its latest picture on the gram.
NASA captioned it, “A pocketful of stars.” The caption elaborated, “In its center, thousands of stars are packed 100 to 1,000 times closer to one another than the nearest stars are to our Sun. The striking difference in star colors is illustrated in the image, which combines different types of light: blue stars, shining brightest in near-ultraviolet light, and red stars, illuminated in red and near-infrared (sic).”
Visible from the Southern Hemisphere, this young globular cluster can be seen in the Dorado constellation which is Portuguese for dolphinfish. Positioned above Earth’s atmosphere, the Hubble can observe them in the ultraviolet while they remain inaccessible to ground-based facilities.
NASA website threw more light on the same by explaining how observing such clusters of stars make astronomers understand not only about the evolution of stars but also help determine the factors that “end their lives as white dwarfs or explode as supernovae”.
