NASA’s Hubble telescope was sent into orbit over three decades ago, but even so, it still has some strong asses up its sleeve. One of its latest space “tricks” is taking a look at what’s cooking in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that revolves around the Milky Way, in order to learn more about some of the Early Universe’s first stars.
SciTechDaily reveals the exotic new adventure of NASA’s Hubble telescope. Eastern Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope also contributed to the quest of Hubble, and the researchers observed that the stars form in the Magellanic Cloud in a similar way as they do in our own galaxy. They’ve also discovered young stars revolving around the core of a cluster that’s located in the satellite galaxy – the NGC 346 star cluster, to be more precise.
Peter Zeidler, a scientist of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency (ESA), conducted another team that used the MUSE instrument of VLT in order to measure radial velocity. Zeidler explained, as SciTechDaily quotes:
What was really amazing is that we used two completely different methods with different facilities and basically came to the same conclusion, independent of each other,
With Hubble, you can see the stars, but with MUSE we can also see the gas motion in the third dimension, and it confirms the theory that everything is spiraling inwards.
It took plenty of time for the very first stars to start illuminating the Universe. Astronomers generally accept the idea that the first stars began to form about 100 million years after the Big Bang. As for the first galaxies in the Cosmos, they began to take shape about 1 billion years after the great event that led to the birth of our Universe.
The new research was published in The Astrophysical Journal.
