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Credit & Copyright: Photograph made from plates taken with the UK
Schmidt Telescope.
Color photography by David Malin.
Copyright: Anglo-Australian Telescope Board
Explanation:
Magellan
and his
crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during their
famous voyage around the world. As a result, two fuzzy cloud like
objects in the southern sky are now known as the Clouds of Magellan.
These star clouds are small irregular galaxies,
satellites of our larger Milky Way spiral galaxy.
The Large Magellanic
Cloud (LMC)
pictured above is only about 180,000 light-years distant - the
only known galaxy closer is the Sagittarius Dwarf.
Both the LMC and the Small Magellanic Clouds (SMC)
are joined to the Milky Way by a
stream
of cold hydrogen gas whose origin
is still controversial. An unusual effect called gravitational
lensing
has recently been detected in a few LMC stars,
and there is hope this could tell us important information about
the true composition of our universe.
Color photography by David Malin.
Copyright: Anglo-Australian Telescope Board
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Based on Astronomy Picture
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