Diese Datei stammt aus Wikimedia Commons und kann von anderen Projekten verwendet werden. Die Beschreibung von deren Dateibeschreibungsseite wird unten angezeigt.
Beschreibung
BeschreibungNGC 346 in Small magellanic cloud.jpg
Hubble astronomers have uncovered, for the first time, a population of infant stars in the Milky Way satellite galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC, visible to the naked eye in the southern constellation Tucana), located 210,000 light-years away.
Hubble's exquisite sharpness plucked out an underlying population of infant stars embedded in the nebula NGC 346 that are still forming from gravitationally collapsing gas clouds. They have not yet ignited their hydrogen fuel to sustain nuclear fusion. The smallest of these infant stars is only half the mass of our Sun.
Although star birth is common within the disk of our galaxy, this smaller companion galaxy is more primeval in that it lacks a large percentage of the heavier elements that are forged in successive generations of stars through nuclear fusion.
Fragmentary galaxies like the SMC are considered primitive building blocks of larger galaxies. Most of these types of galaxies existed far away, when the universe was much younger. The SMC offers a unique nearby laboratory for understanding how stars arose in the early universe. Nestled among other starburst regions with the small galaxy, the nebula NGC 346 alone contains more than 2,500 infant stars.
The Hubble images, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys, identify three stellar populations in the SMC and in the region of the NGC 346 nebula — a total of 70,000 stars. The oldest population is 4.5 billion years, roughly the age of our Sun. The younger population arose only 5 million years ago (about the time Earth's first hominids began to walk on two feet). Lower-mass stars take longer to ignite and become full-fledged stars, so the protostellar population is 5 million years old. Curiously, the infant stars are strung along two intersecting lanes in the nebula, resembling a "T" pattern in the Hubble plot.
This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use. The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org. For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag.
Kurzbeschreibungen
Ergänze eine einzeilige Erklärung, was diese Datei darstellt.
Diese Datei enthält weitere Informationen, die in der Regel von der Digitalkamera oder dem verwendeten Scanner stammen. Durch nachträgliche Bearbeitung der Originaldatei können einige Details verändert worden sein.
Kameraausrichtung
Normal
Horizontale Auflösung
400 dpi
Vertikale Auflösung
400 dpi
Software
Adobe Photoshop CS Windows
Speicherzeitpunkt
16:40, 6. Jan. 2005
Farbraum
Nicht kalibriert
Bildbreite
6.555 px
Bildhöhe
6.995 px
Digitalisierungszeitpunkt
11:40, 6. Jan. 2005
Datum zu dem die Metadaten letztmalig geändert wurden