This new NASA\/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features a cloudy starscape from an impressive star cluster. This scene is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy situated about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa. With a mass equal to 10-20% of the mass of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small galaxies that orbit our galaxy.<\/p>\n
The Large Magellanic Cloud is home to several massive stellar nurseries where gas clouds, like those strewn across this image, coalesce into new stars. Today’s image depicts a portion of the galaxy’s second-largest star-forming region, which is called N11. (The most massive and prolific star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Tarantula Nebula, is a frequent target for Hubble.) We see bright, young stars lighting up the gas clouds and sculpting clumps of dust with powerful ultraviolet radiation.<\/p>\n
This image marries observations made roughly 20 years apart, a testament to Hubble’s longevity. The first set of observations, which were carried out in 2002-2003, capitalized on the exquisite sensitivity and resolution of the then-newly-installed Advanced Camera for Surveys. Astronomers turned Hubble toward the N11 star cluster to do something that had never been done before at the time: catalogue all the stars in a young cluster with masses between 10% of the Sun’s mass and 100 times the Sun’s mass.<\/p>\n
The second set of observations came from Hubble’s newest camera, the Wide Field Camera 3. These images focused on the dusty clouds that suffuse the cluster, bringing a new perspective on cosmic dust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This new NASA\/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features a cloudy starscape from an impressive star…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392,23927],"class_list":["post-23166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space","tag-space-exploration-nasa-galaxies-space-telescopes-stars-nebulae-astronomy-cosmic-rays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}