Hubble Telescope Peers Deep, Finds Nursery of Young Stars

The Hubble space telescope has peered deep into the center of a distant luminous mass and discovered a stellar nursery filled with young, bright stars and a pinwheel of shining gas, scientists said Tuesday.

Brad Whitmore of the Space Telescope Science Institute said Hubble photographs show that a galaxy called NGC7252 is actually the result of two galaxies colliding some 1 billion years ago, creating groups of young stars called globular clusters.

Whitmore said astronomers have long believed that such clusters of stars are formed of stellar bodies that are billions of years old, but the bright blue stars of NGC7252 are estimated to be only 50 million to 500 million years old, mere youngsters in the history of the universe.

Globular clusters, such as those that orbit the Milky Way galaxy, generally contain about a million stars, many of them very old red giant stars. The NGC7252 clusters are about the same size, but the stars are hot and blue, Whitmore said.

The pinwheel structure in the center of the galaxy, he said, is formed by in-falling hot gas that swirls about a nucleus. The structure resembles a spiral galaxy, but it is only 10,000 light years across, about one-twentieth the size of the whole galaxy.

Within the pinwheel structure is enough gas to create about 8 billion stars the size of the sun, the astronomer said.