Astronomers working with the Hubble telescope have published an image of a colorful starscape. It is located in the center of the Small Magellanic Cloud.
The Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that is a companion to our Milky Way. It is located 200,000 light-years away from Earth and is home to about 3 billion stars.
Because of its proximity, the Small Magellanic Cloud is one of the few galaxies that can be seen from Earth without the aid of a telescope or binoculars. To observers in the Southern Hemisphere and some latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, it, and its neighbor the Large Magellanic Cloud, resemble a piece of the Milky Way that has broken off. In reality, they are much farther away than any part of our own galaxy.
With its 2.4-meter “eye” and sensitive instruments, Hubble sees the Small Magellanic Cloud in far more detail and brightness than a human can. The researchers used the WFC3 camera mounted on the telescope to image its central region. Images were taken using four filters, each filter transmitting light at a specific wavelength.
This provided a multicolor picture of the dust clouds surrounding the star cluster, which contains dozens of massive young luminaries. Stars closer to us shine with a bright blue or reddish glow and are surrounded by four diffraction beams. More distant stars appear as dots of orange color. Gas-dust clouds cover the left half of the frame, giving it a blue-greenish tint.
Earlier we reported on how Hubble revealed a “day in the life” of a spiral galaxy.
