This animation illustrates the rotation rate of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Hubble Space Telescope observations have been used to determine that the central part of the LMC completes a rotation every 250 million years. It takes more than 10 million years for even the small amount of rotation illustrated in this video.
Video Credit: NASA
This is a closeup of the Tarantula Nebula (aka 30 Doradus), a large star-forming region of ionized hydrogen gas in the Large Magellanic Cloud 161,000 light-years from Earth. It is the brightest star-forming region in our galactic neighborhood and home to the hottest, most massive stars known.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
Video Credit: ESA
NGC 1858 is an open star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. It contains an abundance of star-forming regions. NGC 1858 is relatively young by astronomical standards, estimated to be only around 10 million years old.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
Video Credit: NASA
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a satellite of the Milky Way containing about 30 billion stars. In this combined radio and near infrared view the LMC’s cool and warm dust are shown in green and blue, respectively, and hydrogen gas in red. The image is composed of data from the European Space Agency Herschel and Planck missions; two retired NASA missions, the Infrared Astronomy Survey and Cosmic Background Explorer; and the ground-based Parkes, ATCA, and Mopra radio telescopes.
Video Credit: NASA
From our galaxy into the Large Magellanic Cloud …
Video Credit: ESO
This Hubble image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The young and dense star cluster R136 can be seen the lower right of the image. This cluster contains hundreds of young blue stars. One of them is the most massive star detected in the universe to date.
Dozens of stars in the cluster exceed 50 solar masses, and nine very massive stars are all more than 100 times more massive than the Sun. The most massive is R136a1—weighing in at more than 250 solar masses.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
Video Credit: ESO
Video Credit: ESO
This chaotic mass of gas and dust is the supernova remnant known as N 63A. It’s about 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
These delicate filaments are actually sheets of debris from a stellar explosion in a neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small companion galaxy to the Milky Way visible from the southern hemisphere. This remnant, know as N49 or DEM L 190, is from a massive star that died in a supernova blast thousands of years ago. This filamentary material will eventually be recycled into building new generations of stars in the LMC. Our own Sun and planets were formed from similar debris of supernovae that exploded in our own galaxy billions of years ago.
These filaments harbor a very powerful spinning neutron star that may be the central remnant from the supernova. It is quite common for the core of an exploded supernova star to become a spinning neutron star (or pulsar) after the immediate shedding of the supernova’s outer layers. The pulsar in N 49 is spinning at a rate of once every 8 seconds. It also has a super-strong magnetic field a thousand trillion times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field. This places this star into the exclusive class of objects called “magnetars.”
Image Credit: NASA
These swirls of gas and dust and the stars clustered in and around them are know as LH 95. It a region of low-mass, infant stars and their much more massive stellar neighbors found in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
The largest stars in LH 95 (those with at least 3X the mass of the Sun) generate strong stellar winds and high levels of UV radiation that heat the surrounding interstellar gas. The result is a bluish nebula of glowing hydrogen expanding outward into the molecular cloud that originally collapsed to form these massive stars. However, some dense parts of this star-forming region remain intact despite the stellar winds. The appear as dark dusty filaments in the picture. These dust lanes absorb some of the blue light emitted by the stars behind them causing them appear redder. Other parts of the molecular cloud have contracted to form infant stars, the fainter of which have a high tendency to cluster.
Image Credit: NASA
The Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble Space Telescope took this picture of the globular cluster NGC 1783. This is one of the biggest globular clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our galaxy.
Image Credit: ESA / NASA
This animation takes us on a virtual journey through a couple of nebulae in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It was put together with data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Video Credit: NASA / ESA / G. Bacon, J. DePasquale, L. Hustak, J. Olmstead, A. Pagan, D. Player, and F. Summers (STScI)
These thin wisps of gas are an object known as SNR 0519. The blood-red clouds are the remains from a violent explosion of a star as a supernova seen about 600 years ago. The star that exploded is known to have been a white dwarf star—a Sun-like star in the final stages of its life.
SNR 0519 is over 150 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish), a constellation that also contains most of our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud, a region of the sky is full of intriguing and beautiful deep sky objects. The Large Magellanic Cloud orbits the Milky Way galaxy as a satellite and is the fourth largest in our group of galaxies.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
This 3D animation explores the nebulae NGC 2014 and NGC 2020 which make up part a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
Video Credit: STScI
This Hubble image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The young and dense star cluster R136 can be seen the lower right of the image. This cluster contains hundreds of young blue stars. One of them is the most massive star detected in the universe to date.
Dozens of stars in the cluster exceed 50 solar masses, and nine very massive stars are all more than 100 times more massive than the Sun. The most massive is R136a1—weighing in at more than 250 solar masses.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
Video Credit: ESA / Hubble / NASA / Digitized Sky Survey 2.
Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin
NGC 346 is the brightest star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy about 210,000 light-years away from Earth. The light, stellar wind, and heat given off by massive stars have spread the glowing gas within and around this star cluster, forming the surrounding wispy, cowbell-like structure of the nebula.
Image Credit: NASA
Video Credit: Deep Sky Videos
This animation illustrates the rotation rate of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Hubble Space Telescope observations have been used to determine that the central part of the LMC completes a rotation every 250 million years. It takes more than 10 million years for even the small amount of rotation illustrated in this video.
Video Credit: NASA
Video Credit: ESO
This brief video wipes from an infrared view of the Tarantula Nebula to one in visible light.
Video Credit: ESO