NASA and ESA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning picture of a giant cosmic smokescreen about 5,000 light-years away from Earth. According to MailOnline, it features a star cluster known as NGC 6530 that includes 4,000 stars, which makes it one of the largest open clusters ever discovered.
The cluster is in the rolling wall of dust and gas from the Lagoon Nebula, which is a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius. The stars are nestled in the swirling gases of red, blue, and orange of the nebula, which is one of the two star nurseries faintly visible from Earth's mid-northern latitudes.
Investigating the Star Cluster in the Cosmic Smokescreen
Hubble's image of the Lagoon Nebula features a portion of the open cluster NGC 6530 that shows a collection of several thousand stars, as per SciTech Daily. The nebula gives the image its distinctly smokey appearance made of clouds of interstellar gas and dust stretching from one side to the other.
Scientists investigated the star cluster using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) aboard the space telescope. They scoured through the region to find new examples of a class of illuminated protoplanetary discs surrounding new stars called proplyds.
The team found that the majority of proplyds are found in one region, close to the Orion Nebula, which makes their origin and lifetimes in other astronomical environments quite challenging.
They attributed the discovery to Hubble's ability to observe infrared wavelengths, particularly with Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which is an indispensable tool for understanding the formation of stars and exoplanetary systems.
For decades, Hubble was crucial to the investigations of the proplyds around newly born stars in the Orion Nebula. Now, it's time for the newly-deployed James Webb Space Telescope to use its observational capabilities at infrared wavelengths to give clearer observations from the Hubble to allow astronomers to peer through the dusty envelopes of star nurseries and investigate their earliest stages.
About NGC 6530
In 2019, Phys.org reported about a group of Italian astronomers who investigated the young open cluster NGC 6530. The team conducted a statistical study of its global properties, providing important insights about the stars in the cluster.
Open clusters like them formed from the same giant molecular cloud and contain thousands of stars loosely bound to each other by gravitational forces. The stars in it have similar ages, chemical compositions, and distances from the Earth. More so, they serve as laboratories for scientists to study star formation and evolution.
NGC 6530 was discovered in the 17th century and was designated OCL 19, or ESO 521-SC21. It is a young open cluster only a few million years old within the Lagoon Nebula. But it is most famous because of its complex morphology and star-formation history. Scientists estimate that it has .round 2,500 cluster members.
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