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This Picture of the Week depicts the open star cluster NGC 330, which lies around 180,000 light-years away inside the Small Magellanic Cloud. The cluster \u2014 which is in the constellation Tucana (The Toucan) \u2014 contains a multitude of stars, many of which are scattered across this striking image.<\/p>\n
Pictures of the Week from the NASA\/ESA Hubble Space Telescope show us something new about the Universe. This image, however, also contains clues about the inner workings of Hubble itself. The criss-cross patterns surrounding the stars in this image \u2014 known as diffraction spikes \u2014\u00a0 were created when starlight interacted with the four thin vanes supporting Hubble\u2019s secondary mirror.<\/p>\n
As star clusters form from a single primordial cloud of gas and dust, all the stars they contain are roughly the same age. This makes them useful natural laboratories for astronomers to learn how stars form and evolve. This image uses observations from Hubble\u2019s\u00a0Wide Field Camera 3, and incorporates data from two very different astronomical investigations. The first aimed to understand why stars in star clusters appear to evolve differently from stars elsewhere, a peculiarity first observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The second aimed to determine how large stars can be before they become doomed to end their lives in cataclysmic supernova explosions.<\/p>\n