The Hubble Space Telescope captured two festive-looking nebulae, positioned so they appear as one. Find out why they glow red here.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image that shows two nebulae appearing as one. The two nebulae are collectively called NGC 248 and reside in the Small Magellanic Cloud. You may know that the Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that is a satellite of our Milky Way. In the image you can see the two nebulae glowing in red. This is because the intense radiation from the bright central stars is heating hydrogen in each of the nebulae.
“There are actually two nebulae in this #HubbleClassic view! Appearing as one, they are collectively called NGC 248. They reside in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. NGC 248 has a length of ‘approximately 60 light years and 20 light years across, Hubble tweeted.
Sharing some details about Hubble NGC 248m in a report, he said the nebula was discovered in 1834 by astronomer John Herschel. It is among a series of bright hydrogen nebulae in the dwarf satellite galaxy, which is about 200,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Tucana.
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The image is part of a study called the Small Magellanic Cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE). Astronomers are using Hubble to probe the Milky Way’s satellite to understand how dust differs in galaxies that have a much smaller supply of the heavy elements needed to create dust.
“The Small Magellanic Cloud has one-fifth to one-tenth the amount of heavy elements in the Milky Way. Because it is so close, astronomers can study its dust in great detail and learn what the dust was like previously in the history of the universe,” the report said.
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“It is also important for understanding the history of our own galaxy,” explained the study’s principal investigator, Dr. Karin Sandstrom of the University of California, San Diego. Most star formation occurred earlier in the universe, at a time when there was a much lower percentage of heavy elements than there is now. “Dust is a really critical part of how a galaxy works, how it forms stars,” Sandstrom said.
It may be noted that the data used in this image was taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys in September 2015.