The Hubble Space Telescope captured a beautiful view of a distant star cluster of stars resembling a scattering of white, red, and blue gems. Space.com.

The photo, published by NASA and EKA, shows NGC330, an open cluster 180,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud, the dwarf galaxy and satellite of the Milky Way galaxy.

“Because star clusters are formed from a primary cloud of gas and dust, all the stars they contain are of the same age. They act as natural ‘laboratories’ so that astronomers can understand how stars form and evolve,” the scientists commented. ..

To create this image, astronomers used 2018 observations archived from Hubble’s Wide Angle Camera 3 to support two different studies aimed at understanding how star clusters develop before supernovae explode and how large stars grow.

“The most striking object in this image is a very small star cluster in the lower left corner of the image, surrounded by a nebula of ionized hydrogen (red) and dust (blue). The 2018 cluster of Hubble Archive data used to create this final image was found in the star cluster Galfor 1, ”the researchers say.

Until Naba’s new James Webb space telescope goes live, scientists studying Galfor 1 will have to wait to see if the nebula around them has a major shock wave effect.

However, the cross-patterns of bright stars are actually distorted by Hubble himself. These are called diffraction beams, which EKA officials say form when the starlight bounces off four blades that support Hubble’s secondary mirror.