Lose Yourself in These Gloriously Detailed New Images of The Magellanic Clouds

 

Astronomers are using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in Chile as a form of the baby monitor, keeping their eye on a neighborhood of nearby space absolutely packed with star nurseries.

The Large and little Magellanic Clouds are the sole two dwarf galaxies visible from Earth with the unaided eye, and fortunately enough, they're also home to a number of the foremost active star-forming regions in our Local Group of galaxies.

It's not the primary time we've tried to peek in and see what these newborns are up to, but it's the foremost penetrating look yet.

The Survey of the Magellanic Stellar History (SMASH) took 50 nights of observation to map in high detail a part 2,400 times greater than the face of the total Moon. The results are breathtaking.

Images of the foremost complex regions within the Magellanic Clouds have now provided roughly 4 billion measurements of 360 million objects, which researchers hope to show into a 'home movie' for this celestial family – one that potentially goes back 13 billion years.

"These satellite galaxies are studied for many years, but SMASH is being employed to map their structure over their full, enormous extent and help solve the mystery of their formation," explains astronomer David Nidever from Montana State University.

Deepest, widest view of the Large Magellanic Cloud from SMASH. (CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/SMASH/Nideve

As gas within these clouds collapses, new stars still are rapidly born, and data from SMASH suggest this flurry of activity was initially triggered by a collision between the massive and little Magellanic galaxies way back.

Now, the 2 still orbit one another. in the future far, far within the future, astronomers think both are swallowed by our own Milky Way.

Deepest, widest view of the Small Magellanic Cloud from SMASH. (CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/SMASH/Nidever)

While the Magellanic Clouds are obtainable and rather small, mapping them intimately still requires deep and efficient imaging. The DECam – a large camera built for observing countless galaxies with the goal of understanding how dark energy pushes them apart – may be a perfect tool for also keeping an in-depth eye on these young stellar neighbors.

Using data obtained from DECam at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, astronomers have probed right to the center of the Magellanic Clouds, where many of the nurseries are found.

"Besides producing amazing images, these data allow us to appear in to the past and reconstruct how the Magellanic Clouds formed their stars over time," says astronomer Knut Olsen from us National Science Foundation.

"With these 'movies' of star formation, we will try and understand how and why these galaxies evolved."