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Space Telescope Science Institute (<http://www.stsci.edu>) Contact:Cheryl Gundy, Media Coordinator/Public Information Officer Phone: USA (410) 338-4707; Email: gundy@stsci.edu Date: Posted 12/2/1999 |
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has peered at a small area within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) to provide the deepest color picture ever obtained in that satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. |
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The faintest stars in the picture are some 100 million times dimmer than the human eye's limit of visibility. Our Sun, if located in the
LMC, would be one of the faintest stars in the photograph, indistinguishable
from the swarm of other similar stars.
The LMC is a small companion galaxy of our own Milky Way, visible only from Earth's southern hemisphere. It is named after Ferdinand Magellan, one of the first Europeans to explore the world's southern regions. The LMC attracts the attention of modern-day astronomers because, at a distance of only 168,000 light-years, it is one of the nearest galaxies. |
NASA's
Hubble Space Telescope has peered at a small area within the Large Magellanic
Cloud (LMC) to provide the deepest color picture ever obtained in that
satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way.
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The Tarantula, lying outside the field of view of the WFPC2 photograph, is a tremendous cloud of gas, within which new stars are forming. NASA astronomers Sally Heap, Eliot Malumuth, and Philip Plait, who work at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, pointed Hubble's spectrograph at the core of the Tarantula to investigate its young stars. They also switched on WFPC2 at the same time, in order to obtain the image presented here. The Hubble Heritage Team later combined the WFPC2 images, taken through different color filters, in order to create the color picture shown here. The range of star colors visible in the WFPC2 image reveals the variety of stellar surface temperatures. Hot stars, with temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius and above, have a bluish-white color; stars cooler than our Sun's 6,000 degrees Celsius are reddish. |
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NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI) NOTE TO EDITORS:
Eliot Malumuth, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 681/CSC, Greenbelt, MD 20771, (phone) 301-286-5776, (fax) 301-286-1752, (e-mail) eliot@barada.gsfc.nasa.gov or Phil Plait, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Building 21, Room G69A, Code 681, Greenbelt, MD 20771, (phone) 301-286-7613, (fax) 301-286-1752, (e-mail) plait@colossus.gsfc.nasa.gov or Jayanne English, Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, (phone) 410-338-4352, (fax) 410-338-5090, (e-mail) jenglish@stsci.edu Image files are available
on the Internet at: <http://heritage.stsci.edu> <http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/1999/44>
Higher resolution digital
versions (300 dpi JPEG and TIFF)
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