The subject of this new Hubble image is NGC 299, an open star cluster located 200,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Tucana.
This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the open star cluster NGC 299. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.
NGC 299 is a relatively small open cluster of stars discovered by the English astronomer Sir John Herschel on August 12, 1834.
Also cataloged as Lindsay 49 and ESO 51-5, it resides in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy which is a satellite of our Milky Way Galaxy and is home to an estimated 2,000 star clusters.
NGC 299 is very young in astronomical terms. Astronomers estimate its age to be about 25 million years.
Open clusters such as NGC 299 are collections of stars weakly bound by the shackles of gravity, all of which formed from the same molecular cloud.
Because of this, all the stars have the same composition and age, but vary in their mass because they formed at different positions within the cloud.
This unique property gives astronomers a cosmic laboratory in which to study the formation and evolution of stars — a process that is thought to depend strongly on a star’s mass.
This image of NGC 299 was made from separate exposures taken in the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).
It is based on data obtained through two filters, an 814 nm infrared filter (F814W) and a 555 nm green filter (F555W).
The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
