Hubble Space
Telescope image shows part of the Tarantula Nebula’s outskirts. This famously
beautiful nebula, located within the Large Magellanic Cloud, is a frequent
target for Hubble. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Josh
Barrington |
In this Hubble Space Telescope image from 2014, brightly glowing plumes of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) appear almost like an ocean current with turquoise-tinted currents and nebulous strands reaching out into the surroundings.
This stunning image shows part of the Tarantula
Nebula’s outskirts located within the LMC, a small nearby galaxy that orbits
the Milky Way and appears as a hazy blob in our skies. Hubble has peered into
this galaxy many times, releasing stunning images of the sparkling stars and
whirling clouds of gas.
The color in most images of the LMC is completely
different from that seen here. For this image, researchers substituted the
customary R filter, which selects the red light, and replaced it with a filter
letting through the near-infrared light. In traditional images, the hydrogen
gas appears pink because it shines most brightly in the red. Here, however,
other less prominent emission lines dominate in the blue and green filters.
This data is part of the Archival Pure Parallel
Project (APPP), which gathered together and processed over 1,000 images taken
using Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, obtained in parallel with other
Hubble instruments. Much of the project’s data could be used to study a wide
range of astronomical topics, such as gravitational lensing and cosmic shear,
exploring distant star-forming galaxies, supplementing observations in other
wavelength ranges with optical data, and examining star populations from
stellar heavyweights ranging all the way down to solar-mass stars.
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