Zooming Into Part Of The Large Magellanic Cloud [720p]

This zoom sequence stars with a wide-field view of the southern sky, including the two Magellanic Clouds, small galactic companions to the Milky Way. We then slowly home in on part of the Large Magellanic Cloud and fade into the very detailed view from the Wide Field Imager at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. Many clusters are visible including an unusually young globular cluster and the remains of a brilliant supernova explosion.

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is only about 160,000 light-years from our own Milky Way — very close on a cosmic scale. This proximity makes it a very important target as it can be studied in far more detail than more distant systems. The LMC lies in the constellation of Dorado (the Swordfish), deep in the southern sky and well placed for observations from ESO's observatories in Chile. It is one of the galaxies forming the Local Group surrounding the Milky Way. Though enormous on a human scale, the LMC is less than one tenth the mass of our home galaxy and spans just 14,000 light-years compared to about 100,000 light-years for the Milky Way. Astronomers refer to it as an irregular dwarf galaxy. Its irregularity, combined with its prominent central bar of stars suggests to astronomers that tidal interactions with the Milky Way and fellow Local Group galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud, could have distorted its shape from a classic barred spiral into its modern, more chaotic form.

credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/NOAO/S. Brunier (imagery), John Dyson (music)

source: http://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1021a/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Large Magellanic Cloud
• galaxy
• stars
• ESO

[1p4142136]

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[SKYSURVEYOR]

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[tab6812]

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