Hidden Treasure In The Large Magellanic Cloud

 

This wide field view of part of the Large Magellanic Cloud includes the location of the N11 star formation region. This image was created from digitised photographs through red and blue filters. The field of view is about three degrees across.

Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin

In the centre of this image, a dark finger of dust blots out much of the light. While nebulae are mostly made of hydrogen, the simplest and most plentiful element in the Universe, dust clouds are home to heavier and more complex elements, which go on to form rocky planets like the Earth. Much finer than household dust (it is more like smoke), this interstellar dust consists of material expelled from previous generations of stars as they died.

Zoom into LHA 120-N11: This video zooms in from a view of the night sky into the Large Magellanic Cloud, and focuses in on part of LHA 120-N11, a region of glowing dust and gas with ongoing star formation.

Credit: NASA, ESA, Digitized Sky Survey 2

The data in this image were identified by Josh Lake, an astronomy teacher at Pomfret School in Connecticut, USA, in the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures image processing competition. The competition invited members of the public to dig out unreleased scientific data from Hubble’s vast archive, and to process them into stunning images. 

 

Josh Lake won first prize in the competition with an image contrasting the light from glowing hydrogen and nitrogen in N11. The image above combines the data he identified with additional exposures taken in blue, green and near infrared light.
Notes

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

[1] Although the Large Magellanic Cloud is generally classified as an irregular galaxy, it shares some features with spiral galaxies, including a clearly visible bar, and a single spiral-arm-like structure. It is thought that the LMC may be a small spiral galaxy that was pulled out of shape by the Milky Way.

Links
Hidden Treasures
Josh Lake’s image of N11

Contacts and sources:
Oli Usher
Hubble/ESA