Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have captured detailed images of the globular star cluster NGC 1651 in the constellation Mensa.
This Hubble image shows the globular cluster NGC 1651 about 162,000 light-years away in the constellation Mensa. Image credits: NASA / ESA / Hubble / L. Girardi / F. Niederhofer.
Globular clusters are densely packed spherical clusters of hundreds of thousands or even millions of stars.
They are among the oldest known objects in the universe and are preferentially associated with the oldest components of galaxies.
There are at least 150 such objects in our Milky Way, and several more may be hidden behind the galaxy's thick disk.
NGC1651 is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, the largest and brightest of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies.
beginning discovered Discovered by British astronomer John Herschel on November 3, 1834, this globular cluster is located approximately 162,000 light-years away in the constellation Mensa.
NGC 1651, also known as ESO 55-30 or LW 12, has a diameter of 120 light years.
“A remarkable feature of this image is that NGC 1651 nearly fills the entire image, even though the globular cluster is only about 10 to 300 light-years in diameter,” Hubble astronomers said. Masu.
“In contrast, there are many Hubble images that feature entire galaxies, tens or even hundreds of millions of light-years in diameter, that more or less fill the entire image.”
Color images of NGC 1651 consist of observations from. Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 Found in the near-infrared and optical portions of the spectrum.
“A common misconception is that Hubble and other large telescopes can observe objects of vastly different sizes by zooming in, much like we would with special cameras on Earth,” the astronomers said. Ta.
“However, while smaller telescopes may have the option to zoom in and out to some extent, larger telescopes do not.”
“Each telescope instrument has a fixed 'field of view' (the size of the area of the sky that can be observed in a single observation).”
“For example, WFC3's ultraviolet/visible light channel, the channel and instrument used to collect the data used in this image, has a field of view that is approximately one-twelfth the diameter of the moon as seen from Earth. Masu.”
“Every time WFC3 makes an observation, it becomes the size of the region of sky it can observe.”
“There are two reasons why Hubble is able to observe objects with such widely different sizes,” the researchers said.
“First, the distance to an object determines how big that object appears from Earth, so an entire galaxy that is relatively far away is compared to a relatively nearby globular cluster like NGC 1651. could take up the same amount of space as the sky.''
“In fact, a distant spiral galaxy lurks just to the left of the cluster in this image. It's undoubtedly much larger than the cluster, but here it appears small enough to blend in with the foreground stars.”
“Second, multiple images across different parts of the sky can be mosaicked to create a single image of an object too large for Hubble's field of view.”
Source: www.sci.news
