NASA used its Swift satellite to produce some of the best ultraviolet maps of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two major galaxies that are closest to Earth.
NASA used its Swift satellite to produce some of the best ultraviolet maps of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two major galaxies closest to Earth. The space agency also collaborated with the Pennsylvania State University on this project.
The two galaxies are visible as two faint patches of stars to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. Although the nearest of the two is over 160,000 light years away, NASA's Swift was able to capture extremely detailed images of the galaxies through its Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope.
"We took thousands of images and assembled them into seamless portraits of the main body of each galaxy, resulting in the highest-resolution surveys of the Magellanic Clouds at ultraviolet wavelengths," said Stefan Immler, who proposed the program and led NASA's contribution to it from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, in a press release.
Both these galaxies orbit each other as well as our Milky Way galaxy. The Larger Magellanic Clouds is one-tenth the size of the Milky Way and contains only 1 percent of the Milky Way's mass, while the Small Magellanic Cloud is half the size of the Larger Magellanic Cloud and two-thirds its mass.
According to NASA, Swift is the only telescope that can produce the sort of high-resolution images in a wide-field multicolor survey like the ones taken. The use of ultraviolet helps scientists suppress the light of stars like the sun.
"Prior to these images, there were relatively few UV observations of these galaxies, and none at high resolution across such wide areas," stated Michael Siegel, the lead scientist for Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope at the Swift Mission Operations Center at the university in State College, Pennsylvania.
These new images could help scientists better understand the birth of stars and their evolution across each galaxy, which is not possible with the Milky Way as the Earth is located inside the galaxy.
