Very little is known about the early universe. Many secrets have remained hidden from human observation despite the Herculean efforts of space agencies. As scientists and researchers make constant research and observations, more and more exciting things emerge. And now, with the help of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have observed stars spiraling into the center of a huge star nursery called NGC 346.
These observations are said to help reveal more clues about our early universe. Sounds exciting, right?
Nature loves spirals from hurricane vortices to pinwheel-shaped protoplanetary disks around newborn stars to vast empires of spiral galaxies across our universe. Now astronomers are baffled to find young stars spiraling into the center of a massive cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way,” NASA said in a release.
According to information provided by NASA about spiral stars, the outer arm of the spiral can fuel star formation in a river-like motion of gas and stars. This is an effective way to encourage star birth, scientists say. The Small Magellanic Cloud has a simpler chemical composition than the Milky Way, making it similar to galaxies found in the younger universe when heavier elements were rarer. Because of this, the stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud burn more and thus run out of fuel faster than in our own Milky Way.
Although the Small Magellanic Cloud is a representative of the early universe, at 200,000 light-years away, it is also one of our closest galactic neighbors. Understanding how stars form in the Small Magellanic Cloud offers new insight into how a firestorm of star birth could have arisen early in the universe’s history, when the universe was going through a “baby boom” about 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang (the so-called universe is now 13.8 billion years old). The new results show that the star formation process there is similar to that in our own Milky Way,” NASA said.
About NGC 346
The NGC is 150 light-years across and boasts the mass of 50,000 Suns. Its interesting shape and rapid rate of star formation have puzzled astronomers. It took the combined power of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to reveal the behavior of this mysterious-looking stellar nest.
NASA reported that half of the Hubble data for this study of NGC 346 is archival. The first observations were made 11 years ago. They have recently been repeated to track the movement of the stars over time. Because of the telescope’s long life, the Hubble data archive now contains more than 32 years of astronomical data powering unprecedented long-term studies.
