NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has peered at a small area within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) to provide the deepest color picture ever obtained in that satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way.
Over 10,000 stars can be seen in the photo, covering a region in the LMC about 130 light-years wide. The faintest stars in the picture are some 100 million times dimmer than the human eye's limit of visibility. Our Sun, if located in the LMC, would be one of the faintest stars in the photograph, indistinguishable from the swarm of other similar stars.
Also visible in the image are sheets of glowing gas, and dark patches of interstellar dust silhouetted against the stars and gas behind them.
The LMC is a small companion galaxy of our own Milky Way, visible only from Earth's southern hemisphere. It is named after Ferdinand Magellan, one of the first Europeans to explore the world's southern regions. The LMC attracts the attention of modern-day astronomers because, at a distance of only 168,000 light-years, it is one of the nearest galaxies.
The Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) image was taken in 1996 in Hubble's "parallel" mode while another of the telescope's instruments, the Faint Object Spectrograph, was taking long exposures of the LMC's Tarantula Nebula. The Tarantula, lying outside the field of view of the WFPC2 photograph, is a tremendous cloud of gas, within which new stars are forming.
NASA astronomers Sally Heap, Eliot Malumuth, and Philip Plait, who work at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, pointed Hubble's spectrograph at the core of the Tarantula to investigate its young stars. They also switched on WFPC2 at the same time, in order to obtain the image presented here.
The Hubble Heritage Team later combined the WFPC2 images, taken through different color filters, in order to create the color picture shown here. The range of star colors visible in the WFPC2 image reveals the variety of stellar surface temperatures. Hot stars, with temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius and above, have a bluish-white color; stars cooler than our Sun's 6,000 degrees Celsius are reddish.
Credits
NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | Starfield in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) |
| Object Description | Starfield in a nearby galaxy |
| R.A. Position | 05h 38m 52s |
| Dec. Position | -69D 14' 09" |
| Constellation | Dorado |
| Distance | The distance to the LMC is 51.4 kpc (168,000 light-years). |
| Dimensions | The image is 2.7 arcminutes wide. At the distance of the LMC this corresponds to a width of 130 light-years. |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description | Principal Astronomers: S. Heap, E. Malumuth and P. Plait (GSFC) |
| Instrument | HST>WFPC2 |
| Exposure Dates | January 31, 1996 - February 1, 1996, Exposure Time: 7 hours |
| Filters | F439W (B), F547W (Stromgren y), F814W (I), and F1024W |
| About The Image | |
| Color Info | Blue: F439W (B) Green: F547W (Stromgren y) Red: F814W (I) + F1024W |
| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | A name or catalog number that astronomers use to identify an astronomical object. |
| Object Description | The type of astronomical object. |
| R.A. Position | Right ascension – analogous to longitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Dec. Position | Declination – analogous to latitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Constellation | One of 88 recognized regions of the celestial sphere in which the object appears. |
| Distance | The physical distance from Earth to the astronomical object. Distances within our solar system are usually measured in Astronomical Units (AU). Distances between stars are usually measured in light-years. Interstellar distances can also be measured in parsecs. |
| Dimensions | The physical size of the object or the apparent angle it subtends on the sky. |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description |
|
| Instrument | The science instrument used to produce the data. |
| Exposure Dates | The date(s) that the telescope made its observations and the total exposure time. |
| Filters | The camera filters that were used in the science observations. |
| About The Image | |
| Image Credit | The primary individuals and institutions responsible for the content. |
| Publication Date | The date and time the release content became public. |
| Color Info | A brief description of the methods used to convert telescope data into the color image being presented. |
| Orientation | The rotation of the image on the sky with respect to the north pole of the celestial sphere. |
