While the James Webb Space Telescope is already revealing new glimpses into the deepest corners of the visible Universe, the Hubble Space Telescope is far from obsolete, as a new photo of the Terzan-1 cluster shows.
The photo, released 10/10 by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which are co-leading the mission, shows a globular cluster located 22,000 light-years from Earth, revealing a beautiful palette of different colors Oldest with remarkable clarity.
This isn’t her Hubble Space Telescope‘s first photo of the cluster Terzan 1; released by NASA an earlier view in 2015. According to an ESA expressionthe 2015 photo was taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which operated until 2009. This instrument had a much lower resolution than the observatory’s current Wide Field Camera 3, which took the new image and was installed by the astronauts during the last Hubble servicing mission.
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The new photo shows the depth of the globular cluster far more detailed than the previous image, showing a multitude of red, aging stars held together by their mutual gravity. Globular clusters are typically a collection of about a hundred thousand stars in a tight, roughly spherical shape. The stars are packed so densely together that the average distance between any two individual stars is about a light-year, about a quarter of the distance between the Sun and our nearest star neighbor. Proxima Centauri.
Often these clusters host some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, which appear red in the Hubble image, while the bluer stars in the photo are younger foreground stars that aren’t part of the cluster, although they definitely add some pizzazz to the star canvas.
“The ages of the stars in the globular cluster tell us that they formed during the early stages of galaxy formation,” ESA officials wrote in a 2015 statement accompanying the older photo. “Your study can also help us understand how galaxies form.”
Globular clusters like Terzan 1 are an important local source of X-rays, according to ESA. “It is likely that these X-rays originate from binary star systems containing a dense neutron star and a normal star,” officials wrote. AND neutron old is the superdense remnant left behind by a sun-like star that explodes when it runs out of fuel. “The neutron star pulls material from the companion star with it, causing a burst of X-rays.”
Scientists aren’t sure how many stellar masses or intermediate masses black holes lurk in globular clusters like Terzan 1. Because it’s impossible to “see” a black hole — they absorb light rather than emit it — the best way for a telescope to spot them is by observing their gravitational influence on the surrounding stars. Unfortunately, this is much more difficult to do in a globular cluster due to the density of stars.
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