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Distant Stars Light Up in Red, White and Blue Just in Time for Independence Day

In all honesty, the Universe couldn’t care less about us puny humans and our political dealings. It couldn’t care less about the colors on our flags, our alliances, and our wants and needs. But from time to time, with a little help from humans and their technology, the Universe manages to surprise us.
Star cluster NGC 330 1 photo
Photo: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Kalirai, A. Milone
The 2021 Independence Day is here, the 245th one, and it will bring with it the usual speeches, tweets, firework displays, barbeques, and so on. But this year, Independence Day also comes with a salute from stars that are 180,000 light-years away.

There’s only one pic accompanying this piece (click photo above to enlarge), one released by NASA a couple of days ago. It shows something people who look at space for a living call the open star cluster NGC 330, in the Small Magellanic Cloud, at a distance so great it takes light, which moves at 186,282 miles per second (299,792 km per second), 180,000 years to reach us.

And it shows stars lit up in red, white and blue (and, granted, some yellowish-orange), as if space was giving the good old U.S. of A a big nod.

The image was captured by the aging but still capable Hubble Space Telescope and contains an impossible-to-count number of stars. According to NASA, the stars in this cluster, like all stars in all other clusters, are roughly the same age, making them useful for people who are trying to figure out how stars form and evolve.

The image was captured with Hubble’s “Field Camera 3 and incorporates data from two very different astronomical investigations.” It shows some of the stars with crisscross patterns around them, a phenomenon, called diffraction spikes, which is the result of starlight interacting “with the four thin vanes supporting Hubble’s secondary mirror.”

As for the colors of each of the stars, it all boils down to temperature. Cooler ones appear red, while warmer ones white or yellow. Really hot ones show up as blue.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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