Stars of all ages are on show on this new NASA/ESA Hubble House Telescope Image of the Week. This glowing spiral galaxy is named NGC 6000 and it’s situated 102 million light-years away within the constellation Scorpius.
This galaxy has a glowing yellow middle and glittering blue outskirts. The colours mirror variations within the common ages, lots and temperatures of the galaxy’s stars. Within the coronary heart of the galaxy, the celebs are usually older and smaller. Much less huge stars are cooler than extra huge stars, and considerably counterintuitively, cooler stars are redder, whereas hotter stars are bluer. Farther out alongside NGC 6000’s spiral arms, good star clusters host younger, huge stars that seem distinctly blue.
Hubble collected the info for this picture whereas surveying the websites of latest supernova explosions in close by galaxies. NGC 6000 has hosted two latest supernovae: SN 2007ch in 2007 and SN 2010as in 2010. Utilizing Hubble’s delicate detectors, researchers are in a position to discern the faint glow of supernovae years after the preliminary explosion. These observations assist to constrain the lots of supernova progenitor stars and might point out if they’d any stellar companions.
By zooming in to the fitting aspect of the galaxy’s disc on this picture, you might even see one thing else yellow and blue: a set of 4 skinny traces. These are an asteroid in our Photo voltaic System, which was drifting throughout Hubble’s discipline of view because it gazed at NGC 6000. The 4 streaks are as a result of completely different exposures that had been recorded one after one other with slight pauses in between. These had been mixed to create this remaining picture. The colours seem this fashion as a result of every publicity used a filter to gather solely very particular wavelengths of sunshine, on this case round crimson and blue. Having these separate exposures is necessary to check and examine stars by their colours — nevertheless it additionally makes asteroid interlopers very apparent!
