With the first scientific results coming from the James Webb Space Telescope, we are learning more than ever before about the early universe. But Webb isn’t the only one helping scientists understand the universe when it was young: As a recent Hubble Space Telescope publication shows, we have a lot to learn from other tools, too.
Hubble researchers recently shared this image of a star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. This small galaxy has a different chemical composition to ours and is therefore more similar to galaxies found in the early universe, so studying it can help us learn how stars were born when the ‘universe was still young.
Astronomers have been baffled to find young stars spiraling toward the center of a massive star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The outer spiral arm of this huge, oddly shaped stellar nursery, called NGC 346, may be fueling star formation in a river-like movement of gas and stars. This is an efficient way to fuel star birth, the researchers say. NASA, ESA, A. James (STScI)
The star cluster, called NGC 346, is small in size at just 150 light-years across, but it’s a particularly busy stellar nursery. This region is full of young stars, and these stars appear to be forming in a spiraling structure of flowing gas and stars that researchers liken to a river. This could help explain why the rate of star formation here is so high.
“The stars are the machines that sculpt the universe. We wouldn’t have life without stars, and yet we don’t fully understand how they form,” study leader Elena Sabbi of the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement. “We have several models that make predictions , and some of these predictions are contradictory. We want to determine what is governing the star formation process because these are the laws we need to also understand what we see in the early universe.”
The findings are relevant to the early universe because, like early galaxies, there are relatively few heavy elements found in the Small Magellanic Cloud. This means that the stars here burn hot and bright and die faster than stars in our galaxy. Seeing how stars are born in this cluster, where material moves in a spiral formation, helps explain what might have happened in the period two to three billion years after the Big Bang.
“A spiral is really the good natural way to feed star formation from the outside to the center of the cluster,” explained another of the researchers, Peter Zeidler of AURA/STScI for the Space Agency European “It’s the most efficient way that the stars and the gas that fuels the most star formation can move toward the center.”
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