UNITED STATES: The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), one of the Milky Way’s closest companions, has lately been beautifully captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA clicks marvelous picture of Small Magellanic Cloud
Around 200,000 light-years from Earth, the SMC is a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way that is home to hundreds of millions of stars.
It forms a pair with the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is best observed from the southern hemisphere but may be seen from some northern latitudes.
The photo, which was posted on Instagram by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, featured an electrifying sea of stars shimmering against a field of pinpoints of light.
“The Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, but this image only focuses on a small percentage of them. The open cluster NGC 376 is made up of these stars and has a mass that is only roughly 3,400 times that of the Sun. As their name implies, open clusters are loosely connected and sparsely populated, ” the post caption read.
This distinguishes open clusters from globular clusters, which typically look like a continuous blur of starlight at their centres because they are so packed with stars, as stated in the post’s title.
Even in the areas of the image that are most densely populated, individual stars may be seen in NGC 376.
Sprinkles of brightly coloured blue, green, and white stars are visible across the photograph, breaking up the vast blackness of space. A big globular cluster of stars with similar colours appears brilliantly close to the image’s centre.
One of the Milky Way’s closest neighbours and one of the furthest things that can be seen with the unaided eye is this Small Magellanic Cloud, or SMC, also known as Nubecula Minor.
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