Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have captured an amazing new photo of the open cluster BSDL 2757.
This Hubble image shows BSDL 2757, an open cluster some 160,000 light-years away in the constellation of Dorado. Image credit: NASA / ESA / L. Bianchi, Johns Hopkins University / G. Kober, NASA & Catholic University of America.
Open star clusters are loosely bound groups of a few tens to a few hundred stars.
These objects are much smaller and more sparsely populated than globular clusters.
Open clusters are young, at just tens or hundreds of millions of years old.
Owing to their open and diffuse structure, they are not particularly stable, and their stars might disperse after a few million years.
For this reason, open clusters are found in spiral and irregular galaxies, where new stars are being formed, but not in elliptical galaxies.
The open cluster BSDL 2757 resides within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
It is located approximately 160,000 light-years away in the constellation of Dorado.
“Hubble captured the new image of BSDL 2757 as part of a study looking at how dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud obscures ultraviolet light in four different star-forming regions of this nearby, irregular galaxy,” said members of the Hubble team.
“Astronomers studied growing, early-stage stars that are still accumulating mass from the clouds that envelop them.”
“As gas and dust spirals toward a budding, young star, it releases ultraviolet light.”
“By analyzing how this light interacts with dust, astronomers can better understand the dust’s properties in different environments.
“The colors blue, green, and orange in this image represent their respective colors in the visible light spectrum,” the researchers said.
“The color red represents light in the near-infrared part of the spectrum.”
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