NASA just released stunning images of cotton candy clouds in a neighboring galaxy taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Cotton Candy Clouds
The new image, captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, features the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the biggest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Located 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa, this galaxy is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere, where it can be seen as a fuzzy, big patch in the night sky.
The LMC is expected to be important to the Milky Way’s future because, within the next 10 billion years, our galaxy is expected to collide with Andromeda, a spiral galaxy 2.5 million light-years away and the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. Scientists have also predicted, however, that the LMC is also moving toward the Milky Way and could begin to interact with it as early as 2.4 billion years from now.
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Though the LMC is one of many dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way, it’s only one of two that are visible to the naked eye. The other is the Small Magnetic Cloud (SMC), which can also be seen in the Southern Hemisphere close to the LMC, but only between the months of October and February.
It was possible to capture this galaxy with such color and dimension because Hubble’s new view uses five filters to isolate different wavelengths of light that human eyes can’t see, including infrared and ultraviolet light. The resulting image features a starry cloudscape of gas against an orange and blue background of stars, which looks like multi-colored cotton candy.
But how real are the details depicted in the image? According to NASA, “When image-processing specialists combine raw filtered data into a multi-colored image like this one, they assign a color to each filter. Visible-light observations typically correspond to the color that the filter allows through. Shorter wavelengths of light, such as ultraviolet, are usually assigned blue or purple, while longer wavelengths, like infrared, are typically red. This color scheme closely represents reality while adding new information from the portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that humans cannot see.”
There’s also a zoomable version of the photo available online, which allows you to appreciate the out-of-this-world details up close.
