Hubble Space Telescope captures exquisite view of nearby star cluster before it fades away

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning view of a cluster of stars that are slowly dissolving into a dwarf galaxy.

The Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that is just 200,000 light-years away from Earth and the Large Magellanic Cloud is a neighboring dwarf galaxy. It's close enough that the Hubble Space Telescope can see a relatively small gathering of stars.

The Hubble photo released by NASA and the European Space Agency shows only a small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud. The more open structure of an open cluster allows us to identify individual stars in its most tightly packed regions. Stars can be within a single light-year of each other and the light from the stars in their central regions blend together in dense gis.

There are the best Hubble Space Telescope images.

The Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, but the smallest one is only about 3,400 solar mass. The southern sky constellation Tucana was first discovered in the late 18th century.

In a study published in The Astrophysical Journal, it was found that the stellar mass of NGC 376 has likely been lost and that it is dissolving into the larger Small Magellanic Cloud. The process is inevitable because of the slow loss of star-forming gas and the pull from the rest of the Cloud.

Data from two investigations were used to create the Hubble image, one using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the other using Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3.

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