The good old Hubble is approaching its retirement, as it will be replaced by the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope. After a glorious career of three decades, the Hubble Space Telescope operated by NASA and ESA still has plenty to prove.
Hubble is proud to present a fresh image of a globular star cluster known as NGC 1805. Feel free to check it our below:
More info needed about the evolution of stars
Beautiful clusters like NGC 1805 could provide more info for the evolution of stars. Regardless of what some scientists want us to believe, there are always new things to learn about the Universe in general and about stars in particular.
“Usually, globular clusters contain stars which are born at the same time; however, NGC 1805 is unusual as it appears to host two different populations of stars with ages millions of years apart,” the team in charge of Hubble explains.
“Observing such clusters of stars can help astronomers understand how stars evolve, and what factors determine whether they end their lives as white dwarfs, or explode as supernovae.”
The star cluster NGC 1805 is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located 158,200 light-years away from Earth. By comparison, the diameter of the Milky Way measures 100,000 light-years across. The Large Magellanic Cloud contains ‘only ‘about 30 billion stars, which is an uninteresting number compared to the amount of stars from our own galaxy: between 100 billion and 200 billion. Furthermore, scientists estimate that most stars in the Universe have planets orbiting around them, which means that the chances for alien life are sky-rocking if we only consider this aspect.
At a distance of about 163,000 light-years away, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the second- or third-closest galaxy to our own, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal and the possible dwarf irregular galaxy Canis Major Overdensity.
