Credit: ESA / Hubble and NASA, L. Girardi
Looking better than ever is the NGC 2203 star cluster, photographed here by the POT/ THAT hubble space telescope. In addition to its stunning appearance, this group of stars contains many astronomical delights that have helped astronomers solve the lives of the stars.
A main sequence star, like our Sun, is the term applied to a star during the longest period of its life, when it burns fuel constantly. Our Sun’s fuel will run out in about 6 billion years, and then it will move on to the next stage of its life when it turns into a red giant. Astronomers studying NGC 2203, which contains stars that are roughly twice as massive as our Sun, discovered that their rotation could be a factor in why some of the stars stay longer than usual in this main sequence phase of their lifetime.
This is the best resolution obtained from the star cluster to date.
Star clusters They are large groups of stars. Two types of star clusters can be distinguished: globular clusters are narrow clusters of hundreds to millions of ancient stars that are gravitationally bonded, while open clusters, groups of more loosely clustered stars, generally contain fewer than a few hundred members, and are often very young. Open clusters are disrupted over time by the gravitational influence of giant molecular clouds as they move across the Galaxy, but the cluster members will continue to move in the same direction through space even though they are no longer gravitationally bonded; then they are known as a stellar association, sometimes also called a moving group.
