Open Star Cluster NGC 299 in The Small Magellanic Cloud | Hubble
It may be famous for hosting spectacular sights, such as the Tucana Dwarf Galaxy and 47 Tucanae, the second brightest globular cluster in the night sky, but the southern constellation of Tucana (The Toucan) also possesses a variety of unsung cosmic beauties.
One such beauty is NGC 299, an open star cluster located within the Small Magellanic Cloud just under 200,000 light-years away. Open clusters such as this are collections of stars weakly bound by the shackles of gravity. They form from the same massive molecular cloud of gas and dust. Due to this, all the stars have the same age and composition, but vary in their mass because they formed at unique positions within the cloud.
The Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.
Distance from Earth: 200,000 light years
This unique property not only ensures a spectacular sight when viewed through a sophisticated instrument attached to a telescope, such as Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, but gives astronomers a cosmic laboratory to study the formation and evolution of stars—a process that is thought to depend strongly on a star's mass.
Release Date: Oct. 17, 2016
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