Hubble Legacy: 30 Years of Discoveries and Images by Jim Bell

Hubble Legacy: 30 Years of Discoveries and Images by Jim Bell

Author:Jim Bell [Bell, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00


NEW HOT YOUNG STARS

May 2015

The center of the Milky Way is a busy place. We know that, like most galaxies, ours harbors a supermassive black hole (more than 4 million times the mass of the Sun; see A Monster Black Hole Gazes Back, page 136). High-resolution images from ground-based facilities and Hubble have been able to reveal details of other astronomical objects orbiting near that black hole at the galactic center. These include three extremely dense and compact young star clusters.

One of those clusters, known as the Arches cluster (located in the constellation Sagittarius, the Archer), consists of about 150 massive stars that are among the brightest in the entire galaxy (plus many thousands of less-massive stars). Despite its spectacular brightness, the Arches cluster is invisible to the naked eye from Earth because it is dimmed substantially by the dense gas and dust near the galactic center. The stars in the Arches cluster are packed more closely together than anywhere else in the galaxy. Indeed, the proximity of the stars is so extreme that if it were duplicated around our own Sun, there would be more than 100,000 stars in the same volume as the space between the Sun and Alpha Centauri, the closest other star to us at 4.4 light-years away.

ABOVE: Hubble’s ACS instrument near-infared false-color composite photograph of the Arches Cluster, located some 25,000 light years away and very close to the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The Arches cluster is one of three young, massive star clusters near the galactic center that have some of the largest number of stars per unit volume in the known universe.

OPPOSITE: This Hubble WFC3 false-color photo mosaic reveals a tapestry of millions of stars deep within the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. This central region of the galaxy is about 27,000 light years away and is so packed with stars that it would be like cramming a million Suns into the space between our star and its nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri. Lurking in the very center of this dense star cluster is a black hole estimated to have a mass more than 4 million times that of our Sun.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.