Spiraling? It's natural 💁
Spirals are everywhere: from the whirlpool of a hurricane to pinwheel-shaped disks around newborn stars, to the vast realms of spiral galaxies across our universe.
Astronomers have found young stars spiraling into the center of a massive and oddly shaped stellar nursery in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located 200 light-years away.
A spiral is the most efficient way to feed star formation from the outside toward the center. Learning how stars form in the Small Magellanic Cloud offers a new twist on how a firestorm of star birth may have occurred early in the universe's history, when it was undergoing a "baby boom" about 2 to 3 billion years after the big bang (the universe is now 13.8 billion years old). The new results find that the process of star formation there is similar to that in our own Milky Way.
Image description: The Small Magellanic Cloud shrouds the view of space with blue and purple hues, as the sky is littered with stars. Near the center of the image, a cluster of stars create a vague shape of a swirl. The next image slide includes the same image of the Small Magellanic cloud, but with a superimposed semi-transparent red swirl graphic highlighting the unique star formation.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Andi James (STScI)
#NASA#Hubble#Galaxy#Space#Cosmic#Stars#Nursery#Spirals#Nature