The Small Magellanic Cloud is a satellite of the Milky Way, containing about 3 billion stars. This far-infrared and radio view of it shows the cool (green) and warm (blue) dust, as well as the hydrogen gas (red). The image is composed of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) Herschel mission, supplemented with data from ESA’s retired Planck observatory and two retired NASA missions: the Infrared Astronomy Survey and Cosmic Background Explorer, as well as the Parkes, ATCA, and NANTEN radio telescopes.
Credits
Image
ESA, NASA, NASA-JPL, Caltech, Christopher Clark (STScI), S. Stanimirovic (UW-Madison), N. Mizuno (Nagoya University)
