The European Space Agency's Planck satellite revealed the two Magellanic Clouds neighboring our galaxy in an image that looks like it should be hanging in a modern art museum.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the red blob seen in the image, the Small Magellanic Cloud is the triangular object in the bottom left corner. The Large Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud are 160,000 and 200,000 light-years away, respectively. They are classified as dwarf galaxies, and are ten and seven billion times the mass of our Sun. Interstellar dust from the diffuse medium that breaches the realms of the Milky Way is represented as the red, orange and yellow clouds in the upper part of this image. A filament can also be seen stretching from the dense clouds of the Chameleon constellation, which houses the interstellar dust, towards the top right corner of the image. The lower right part of the image is one of the faintest areas of the sky at Planck's frequencies, and the blue color represents low densities of cosmic dust.
Planck detected dust between the stars pervading the Magellanic Clouds while looking at the cosmic microwave background, which is the light created during the Big Bang. The satellite picked up anything that shone between itself and the cosmic microwave background's most sensitive frequencies. These foreground contributions need to be removed in order for astronomers to get a look at the cosmic information tucked away in the ancient light, but could provide insight into how stars form in galaxies.
By comparing the structure of the magnetic field and the distribution of interstellar dust in the Milky Way, the researchers hope to estimate the relative distribution of interstellar clouds and the ambient magnetic field.
