NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed stars and gases rising toward the core of a strangely shaped huge stellar nursery in the nearby Small Magellanic Cloud, RT reported.
Astronomers believe that the outer arm of this spiral of stars and gas might provide a river-like flow of gas that fuels star formation in the stellar nursery, called NGC 346, seen in the newly released image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The discovery might provide important clues regarding how stars originated when the galaxy, now 13.8 billion years old, was a few billion years old and was undergoing a stellar spurt of intense star formation.
“Stars are the machines that have sculpted the universe. We wouldn’t have life without stars, yet we don’t fully understand how they form,” study lead Elena Sabi, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who directs the Hubble program, said in a statement.
“We have several models that make predictions, and some of these predictions are contradictory. We want to determine what regulates star formation because these are the laws we also need to understand what we see in the early universe.”
NGC 346 is only regarding 150 light-years across, and contains stellar matter the mass of 50,000 suns. The region has been baffling to astronomers because of the intense rate of star formation.
The Small Magellanic Cloud, which includes NGC 346, is located only 200,000 light-years from Earth, which means astronomers are seeing younger light from distant galaxies that might reveal the early universe. However, the dwarf galaxy is similar to the early galaxies in other respects.
The Small Magellanic Cloud has a simpler chemical composition than the Milky Way, just like the early galaxies that had not yet been enriched with heavier elements by successive generations of stars that transformed into a supernova, exploded and seeded space with the elements formed during their lifetime. Because of this simple chemistry, stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud are hotter and burn in fuel more quickly than stars in the Milky Way, meaning they age faster than stars in our galaxy.
However, despite these differences, researchers have discovered that star formation in the Small Magellanic Cloud proceeds similarly to what happens in the Milky Way.
Watching a spiral star
To study star formation in the Small Magellanic Cloud, astronomers have turned to the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in northern Chile, to examine the motion of stars in two different ways.
Sabi and her team used Hubble to measure changes in the positions of stars in the galaxy over the course of 11 years.
The stars move at a speed of regarding 3,200 km per hour, which means that over the course of 11 years they move regarding 320 million km, or just over twice the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
But that’s still a small distance when viewed from our location 150 light-years away.
Meanwhile, a second crew of astronomers led by European Space Agency (ESA) researcher Peter Zeidler used the Very Large Telescope’s Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument to measure the radial velocity of stars, and how fast the star is moving toward or away from the observer.
Both methods revealed a vortex of stars feeding into the core of NGC 346, carrying star-forming gas with them.
“What was really amazing is that we used two completely different methods with different facilities, and basically came up with the same result independently,” Zeidler said in the statement. “With Hubble, you can see stars, but with Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer we can also see the movement of gas in the third dimension.” This confirms the theory that everything escalates inward.”
Zeidler also explained the importance of spirals to star birth, saying: “The spiral is really a good natural way to fuel star formation from the outside toward the center of mass. It’s the most efficient way stars and the gases that fuel more star formation can move toward the center.”