While the James Webb Space Telescope is already revealing new insights into the deepest recesses of the visible universe, the Hubble Space Telescope is way off time, as a new image of Terzan 1 shows.
The image, released October 10 by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which jointly manage the mission, shows a globular cluster located 22,000 light-years from Earth, revealing a fascinating palette of different colors. stars With amazing clarity.
this is not Hubble Space TelescopeThe first photo of the Terzan 1 set; NASA released An earlier view in 2015. According to the European Space Agency statementthe image was taken in 2015 with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary 2 camera, which was in operation until 2009. This instrument had a much lower resolution than the observatory’s current Wide Field Camera 3, which captured the new image and which astronauts installed during Hubble’s last service mission .
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The new image shows depth spherical mass In much more detail than the previous image, revealing a plurality of old red stars bound together by their mutual gravity. Globular clusters are usually a group of about a hundred thousand stars in a roughly narrow spherical shape. The stars are so tightly packed together that the average distance between any two individual stars is about one light-year, which is roughly a quarter of the distance between the Sun and our nearest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri.
These clusters are often home to some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, shown in red in the Hubble image, while the blue stars in the image are younger foreground stars and are not part of the cluster, although they certainly add some subtlety to the star canvas.
“The ages of the stars in the globular cluster tell us that they formed during the early stages of galactic formation,” ESA officials wrote in a 2015 statement of the old image. “Studying them can also help us understand how galaxies form.”
The European Space Agency has indicated that globular clusters such as Terzan 1 are an important local source of X-rays. “It is likely that these X-rays come from binary star systems that contain a dense neutron star and an ordinary star,” the officials wrote. a neutron star The super-dense remnant left by a sun-like star that explodes when it runs out of fuel. “The neutron star pulls material from the companion star, causing an outburst of X-ray emissions.”
Scientists are not sure how many stellar masses or average masses are black holes It lies within globular clusters like Terzan 1. Because a black hole is impossible to “see” – it absorbs light rather than its radiation – the best way for a telescope to detect it is by observing the effect of its gravity on surrounding stars. Unfortunately, this is difficult to do in a globular cluster due to the density of stars.
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