Brilliant turquoise plumes ripple through the Milky Way’s companion galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, like waves in the ocean in a mesmerizing new view shared by NASA.
the venerable The Hubble Space Telescope captured this breathtaking view of the Tarantula Nebula, which sits in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way located approximately 163,000 light-years from Earth. The LMC is one of the closest galaxies to Earth and is visible to the naked eye as a faint cloud in the Southern Hemisphere sky.
The photo, taken by Hubble in 2014, captures bright, shiny, shimmering plumes of gas stars. The turquoise plumes and nebulous strands of the Tarantula Nebula appear to flood the LMC like ocean currents cascading through space.
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“The Hubble Space Telescope has repeatedly peered into this galaxy, releasing stunning images of the swirling clouds of gas and twinkling stars,” NASA officials said. written in a statement.
However, “in most LMC images, the color is completely different from what is seen here,” the statement said. “For this image, the researchers replaced the usual R filter, which selects red light, with a filter that lets near-infrared light pass through. In traditional images, hydrogen gas appears pink because it glows most in the red. Here, however, other less prominent emission lines dominate in the blue and green filters.”
This image of the LMC was taken as part of an initiative called the Archival Pure Parallel Project (APPP), which includes more than 1,000 images taken using Hubble’s Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 and other instruments telescope scientists.
In turn, APPP data can be used to study a wide range of astronomical features and effects, including gravitational lenscosmic shear, variable-mass and distant stars galaxies. The data can also be used to supplement observations collected at other wavelengths to paint an even more detailed view of the cosmos.
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