Large Magellanic Cloud tagged posts

University of Copenhagen astrophysicists help explain a mysterious phenomenon, whereby stars suddenly vanish from the night sky. Their study of an unusual binary star system has resulted in convincing evidence that massive stars can completely collapse and become black holes without a supernova explosion.

One day, the star at the center of our own solar system, the Sun, will begin to expand until it engulfs Earth. It will then become increasingly unstable until it eventually contracts into a small and dense object known as a white dwarf.

However, if the Sun were of a weight class roughly eight times greater or more, it would probably go out with a huge bang — as a supernova...

Glowing brightly about 160,000 light-years away, the Tarantula Nebula is the most spectacular feature of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way. This image from VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile shows the region and its rich surroundings in great detail. It reveals a cosmic landscape of star clusters, glowing gas clouds and the scattered remains of supernova explosions. Credit: ESO

Glowing brightly about 160,000 light-years away, the Tarantula Nebula is the most spectacular feature of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way. A new image reveals a cosmic landscape of star clusters, glowing gas clouds and the scattered remains of supernova explosions. This is the sharpest image ever of this entire field.

Taking advanta...

Astronomers from the University of Cambridge, U.K., have detected a number of narrow streams and diffuse debris clouds around 2 nearby irregular dwarf galaxies called the Magellanic Clouds. The research also implies that one of these dwarf galaxies – the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) could be more massive than previously thought.

“Even though a prominent gaseous stream emanating from the clouds has been known and studied for some time, no obvious stellar streams had been found until recently,” Vasily Belokurov. Belokurov, together with colleague Sergey Koposov, used the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to track down stellar debris on the outskirts of the Magellanic Clouds. They were searching for the Magellanic stellar halo substructure using blue horizontal-branch (BHB) stars as tracers...