Our galactic companion, the Small Magellanic Cloud, sparkles in Hubble image

By Georgina Torbet December 11, 2022

Each week researchers from the Hubble Space Telescope share an image they have captured of a particular object or region in space. This week’s Hubble image shows the Small Magellanic Cloud, or SMC, which is a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way.

The SMC is tiny compared to our galaxy, at just 7,000 light-years across compared to the approximately 100,000 light-years of the Milky Way, making it a type called a dwarf galaxy. It is also one of our nearest neighbors and a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, meaning it is gravitationally bound to our galaxy. It can be seen with the naked eye, along with its companion the Large Magellanic Cloud, mostly visible from the southern hemisphere.

Image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). — This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a dwarf galaxy and one of the Milky Way’s nearest neighbors, lying only about 200,000 light-years from Earth. It makes a pair with the Large Magellanic Cloud, and both objects are best seen from the Southern Hemisphere but are visible from some northern latitudes as well. ESA/Hubble and NASA, A. Nota, G. De Marchi

This image is just a small part of the SMC. “The Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, but this image focuses on just a small fraction of them,” Hubble scientists write. “These stars comprise the open cluster NGC 376, which has a total mass of only about 3,400 times that of the Sun. Open clusters, as the name suggests, are loosely bound and sparsely populated.”

The SMC was the site of one of the most important discoveries in the history of astronomy, as pioneer Henrietta Leavitt observed a type of variable star called a Cepheid variable there. Leavitt showed that these stars have a set relationship between how brightly they glow and how often they pulse, allowing researchers to tell how bright a star would be based on its pulsing. By comparing a Cepheid variable’s luminosity with its observed brightness, researchers can accurately tell how far away it is. This means these stars can be used as distance markers, allowing astronomers to gauge distances in the universe.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Tech News

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…

Space

Hubble scientists create tool for erasing satellite trails from images

This image captures the streak of an Earth-orbiting artificial satellite crossing Hubble's field of view during an observation of "The Mice" interacting galaxies (NGC 4676). A typical satellite trail is very thin and will affect less than 0.5% of a single Hubble exposure. Though in this case the satellite overlaps a portion of the target galaxy, the observation quality is not affected. That's because multiple exposures are taken of the same target. And the satellite trail is not in other frames. Developers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, have software that identifies the bad pixels from the satellite photobombing, the extent to which they affect the image, and then flags them. When flagged, scientists can recover the full field of view. Even as the number of satellites increases over the decade, these tools for cleaning the images will still be applicable.

With ever-increasing numbers of satellites in the sky, astronomers have repeatedly expressed worry over how these satellites could impact scientific research. Earlier this year, a study of Hubble Space Telescope observations showed how some images were being ruined by streaks of light coming from satellites -- and while only a small percentage of Hubble images were affected, the authors raised concerns that with the projected number of satellites set to explode in the next decade, the problem could become serious.

Now, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which runs Hubble, have come up with a tool to deal with satellite streaks in Hubble images. "We developed a new tool to identify satellite trails that is an improvement over the previous satellite software because it is much more sensitive. So we think it will be better for identifying and removing satellite trails in Hubble images," said Dave Stark of STScI in a statement.

Space

Hubble celebrates its 33rd birthday with stunning nebula image

Astronomers are celebrating the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s 33rd launch anniversary with an ethereal photo of a nearby star-forming region, NGC 1333. The nebula is in the Perseus molecular cloud, and is located approximately 960 light-years away.

It will soon be the 33rd anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, and to celebrate this milestone, Hubble scientists have shared a stunning image taken by the telescope of a picturesque nebula. NGC 1333 is a busy stellar nursery, with new stars forming among the cloud of dust and gas located 960 light-years away.

The beautiful image of the nebula shows swirls of dark dust around glowing points of light where new stars are being born. To capture this scene, Hubble used its instruments across their full wavelengths, from ultraviolet through the optical light range and into the near-infrared. Hubble took the image using its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, which used several filter across different wavelengths that were then assigned to colors (Blue: F475W, Green: F606W, Red: F657N and F814W) to create the colorful final result.

Space

There’s a cosmic jellyfish in this week’s Hubble image

The galaxy JW100 (lower right) features prominently in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The streams of star-forming gas dripping from the disk of the galaxy like streaks of fresh paint are formed by a process called ram pressure stripping. Their resemblance to dangling tentacles led astronomers to refer to JW100 as a ‘jellyfish’ galaxy. JW100 is over 800 million light-years away, in the constellation Pegasus.

This week's Hubble image shows an unusual type of galaxy that might seen more at home in the ocean than among the stars: a jellyfish galaxy. These galaxies have a main body of stars, with tentacle-like structures reaching off away from the body in just one direction. This particular jellyfish galaxy, known as JW100, is located more than 800 million light-years away and is found in the constellation of Pegasus.

The jellyfish galaxy is located toward the bottom right of the image, with purple-pink tentacles of stars reaching downward. In the upper middle part of the image, you'll also see two very bright blobs, which are the core of another galaxy within the same galaxy cluster. This nearby galaxy, called IC 5338, is the brightest one within the cluster and has a large glowing area around it called a halo.