NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope recently captured a stunning image of NGC 1858, a beautiful open star cluster located in an area rich in star-forming regions. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration shared the image on Instagram, which showed an electric sea of stars glistening against a backdrop of pinpricks of light.
“A star-forming region is abundant in an open star cluster northwest of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. Open clusters are a type of star cluster in which the stars have a weak gravitational attraction to one another, causing the cluster to be more spread out and unusually shaped “the space agency wrote in the post’s caption.
Look at the images below:
Astronomers at NASA estimate that this star cluster is about 10 million years old. They explained that, in addition to its unusual shape, NGC 1858 is an emission nebula, which is a cloud of interstellar gas that has been ionised by UV radiation from nearby stars.
According to the post’s caption, the nebula’s gas produces its own visible light, which can be seen in this image as a faint cloud in the middle and bottom right of the image.
