Andromeda Core peeped in by Hubble Space Telescope

The NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has successfully peeped into the rare blue stars in the Andromeda Core. The rare discovery was made when scientists were looking deep into the neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy.

According to Astronomers, who used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, there are roughly 8,000 blue stars within 2,600 light-years of the core of Andromeda.

The blue colour of stars indicates that stars are hot and young and are currently experience a lot of volatile activity. However, these stellar oddities are ageing and are prematurely casting off their outer layers which in turn has exposed their blue-hot
cores.

These findings have surprised astronomers. While Hubble has spied these ultra-blue stars before in Andromeda, the new observation covers a much broader area, revealing that these stellar misfits are scattered throughout the galaxy’s bustling center. Astronomers
used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to find roughly 8,000 of the ultra-blue stars in a stellar census made in ultraviolet light, which traces the glow of the hottest stars. The study is part of the multi-year Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury survey to
map stellar populations across the galaxy.

“We were not looking for these stars. They stood out because they were bright in ultraviolet light and very different from the stars we expected to see,” said Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington in Seattle, leader of the Hubble survey.

The results deduced will be presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting which will take place in Austin, Texas shortly.

The astronomers have proposed two possible scenarios to explain why these blue stars evolve differently. According to Rosenfield, the most likely scenario is that the stars are rich in chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium. Observations with ground-based
telescopes have shown the stars in the galaxy’s hub have an abundant supply of “heavy elements,” which makes it easier for stars to eject lots of material into space late in life.u Hu

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Posted by Taimoor Tariq on Jan 12 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry