The most detailed color image yet obtained of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, was captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
The dimmest stars in the image are about 100 million times fainter than what the human eye can see.
It was then that the Hubble Heritage Team combined WFPC2 exposures taken with several different color filters into this colorful composite.
The colors reveal the temperatures of the stars: those hotter than about 10,000 degrees Celsius shine blue-white, while stars cooler than the Sun (about 6,000 degrees C) appear reddish.
This is useful for studying star life cycles and the evolution of galaxies in detail.
The most detailed color image yet obtained of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, was captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This image, taken in 1996, contains more than 10,000 individual stars in a region about 130 light-years across and has provided both astronomers and the public with an unparalleled look at one of our nearest galactic neighbors.
The dimmest stars in the image are about 100 million times fainter than what the human eye can see. If our Sun were located in the LMC, it would be one of the faintest dots of light, lost amid the plethora of other stars like it. The canvas is peppered with sheets of hot gas that glow alongside deep, dark lanes of interstellar dust drifting outwards, or silhouetted against the coalesced stars of the packed star field.
The LMC can be observed only from the Southern Hemisphere. It is about 168,000 light-years away, at a distance comparable to that of more readily studied galaxies, making it a good target for detailed astronomical study. It was named for the explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Its nearness provides an unparalleled natural laboratory for studying the processes of star formation and stellar evolution.
This image was taken in “parallel” mode with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), while the Faint Object Spectrograph performed observations on the Tarantula Nebula, a huge star-forming region just outside WFPC2’s field of view.
With this map in hand, Sally Heap, Eliot Malumuth, and Philip Plait, NASA astronomers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, aimed the spectrograph at the nebula’s center to determine what types of young stars are present there. At the same time, WFPC2 was collecting exposures that would comprise the famous image.
It was then that the Hubble Heritage Team combined WFPC2 exposures taken with several different color filters into this colorful composite. The colors reveal the temperatures of the stars: those hotter than about 10,000 degrees Celsius shine blue-white, while stars cooler than the Sun (about 6,000 degrees C) appear reddish.
Aside from its sheer beauty, this image gives astronomers their first complete star count in a neighboring galaxy. This is useful for studying star life cycles and the evolution of galaxies in detail. For the general public, it exposes the complexity of the universe beyond our own Milky Way.
