Hubble Captures The beautiful Cluster NGC 299 in Tucana

The southern constellation of Tucana is home to some spectacular sights, like the Tucana Dwarf Galaxy and 47 Tucanae globular cluster, which happens to be the second brightest globular cluster in the night sky, but aside this amazing features it also possesses a variety of unsung cosmic marvels.

Such as the open star cluster NGC 299, this is 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, all of which formed from the same massive molecular cloud of gas and dust. Because of this, all the stars in it have the same age and composition, however they vary in their mass because they formed at different positions within the cloud.

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 also and more important, it 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.

Given that the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy is much less massive than our own Milky Way galaxy, it can help to study its stellar populations and compare them to our own, and by doing that one may determine how external factors can affect the stellar formation, so they are indeed important objects. 

Sources: NASA, Hubble, ESA, Wikipedia