The open cluster NGC 330 is located about 180,000 light years distant from Earth in the southern constellation of Tucana.
Open clusters are large groups of stars loosely held together by gravity, formed from the same molecular cloud . "As star clusters are formed from a single primordial cloud of gas and dust, all the stars they contain are roughly the same age," the Hubble astronomers clarify. "This makes them useful natural laboratories for astronomers to learn how stars form and evolve."
This one in question, NGC 330, was discovered on August 1, 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop. It contains a multitude of stars, many of them scattered in the new image provided by the NASA and ESA space telescope, Hubble.
" This amazing image uses observations from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and incorporates data from two very different astronomical investigations . The first was aimed at understanding why stars in star clusters seem to evolve differently from stars in other stars. places, a peculiarity first observed by Hubble. The second was to determine how big stars can be before they are doomed to end their lives in cataclysmic supernova explosions, "they explain.
Reference: NASA
