Young stars enveloped in a transformative cocoon of gas shine brightly in a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
The newborn stars belong to a cluster known as NGC 460, which is located in a region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. NGC 460 is surrounded by a number of other young stellar clusters and varying sized nebulae, which are clouds of gas and dust that fuel new star formation.
Within this region, also known as N83, there are a number of O-type stars, the brightest, hottest and most massive of main-sequence stars (like the sun), which burn hydrogen at their core. O-type stars are rare; there are thought to be just 20,000 of them in the Milky Way, according to a statement from NASA releasing the Hubble image on March 8.
“The clouds of gas and dust can give rise to stars as portions of them collapse, and radiation and stellar winds from those hot, young bright stars in turn shape and compress the clouds, triggering new waves of star formation,” NASA officials said in the statement. “The hydrogen clouds are ionized by the radiation of nearby stars, causing them to glow.”
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Classified as an open star cluster, NGC 460 is a loosely bound group of stars, held together by gravity. This type of cluster typically contains a few dozen to a few thousand relatively young stars from the same giant molecular cloud.
In this case, NGC 460 is believed to have formed following a collision between two hydrogen clouds. This type of interaction could have triggered the birth of several O-type stars and nebulae in the N83 region, according to the statement.
“The NGC 460 star cluster resides in one of the youngest parts of this interconnected complex of stellar clusters and nebulae,” NASA officials said in the statement.
As the stars continue to grow in their cocoon, they may migrate outward and disperse into the Small Magellanic Cloud someday. As one of the Milky Way’s closest and brightest galactic neighbors, residing only about 200,000 light-years from Earth, the Small Magellanic Cloud offers an opportunity to study phenomena that are otherwise difficult to examine in more distant galaxies.
The recent images of NGC 460 stem from a study on the gas and dust between stars — called the interstellar medium — to better understand how gravitational forces between interacting galaxies can foster bursts of star formation. Six overlapping observations taken using the Hubble Space Telescope at both visible and infrared wavelengths were combined to create the new mosaic image.
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