Hubble Space Telescope

Images - 3 - NON_HUBBLE

Magellanic Clouds

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are two irregular dwarf galaxies in our Local Group of galaxies. They are 48.5 kpc and 61 kpc away from us respectively, which is very close to us cosmologically. Until recently, they were thought to be orbiting the Milky Way galaxy, but new research shows that they are not gravitationally bound.

Credit: ESA. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

Centaurus A is a lenticular radio galaxy approximately four Mpc away (13 million light-years) making it one of the closest active galaxies to the Earth. Observations in infra-red and radio wave lengths have identified jets of material emanating from the core perpendicular to the dust lanes shown in the top photograph. Close to the galaxy, the jets are moving at around half the speed of light. The cause is almost certainly a supermassive black hole of about 100 million solar masses at the center of the galaxy.

Centaurus A is the result of a merger of an elliptical with a spiral galaxy; probably a barred-spiral like the Milky Way as analysis has identified the faint remains of the central bar. This has triggered huge new star formation, with over 100 star forming regions identified to date. You can see many massive, bright blue stars to the right edge, and near the lower left in the lower left picture of the galaxy.

The parallelogram shape in the lower right picture is the remnant of the small spiral galaxy that merged between 200 and 700 million years ago. The image was taken in the near-infrared to highlight this feature which is not visible in the main picture

Credit: ESO/WFI (Optical);
MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al.
(Submillimetre);
NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray).

Credit: ESO/
Y. Beletsky

Credit: ESO

All the above licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

Science - Hubble Space Telescope

Images - 3 - NON_HUBBLE

Magellanic Clouds

Centaurus A Galaxy