The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a spectacular image of NGC 248, a glowing pink nebula in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
This Hubble image shows NGC 248, a nebula located in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The data used in this image were taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys in September 2015. Image credit: NASA / ESA / STScI / K. Sandstrom, University of California, San Diego / SMIDGE Team.
Our Milky Way Galaxy is part of a collection of galaxies known as the Local Group.
Along with the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way is one of the Group’s most massive members, around which many smaller satellite galaxies orbit.
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are famous examples, which can easily be seen with the naked eye from the southern hemisphere.
Within the smaller of these galaxies, Hubble captured two festive-looking emission nebulae, conjoined so they appear as one. Together they are called NGC 248.
Discovered on April 11, 1834 by English astronomer Sir John Herschel, NGC 248 is about 60 light-years long and 20 light-years wide.
The nebula is located in the constellation Tucana, approximately 200,000 light-years away from Earth.
It was observed as part of the Small Magellanic cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE) survey.
This ground-based image shows the Small Magellanic Cloud. The area of the SMIDGE survey is highlighted, as well as the position of NGC 248. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Digitized Sky Survey 2.
In this survey astronomers are using Hubble to probe the Small Magellanic Cloud to understand how its dust is different from the dust in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Thanks to its relative proximity, the Small Magellanic Cloud is a valuable target.
It also turns out to have only between a fifth and a tenth of the amount of heavy elements that the Milky Way has, making the dust similar to what we expect to see in galaxies in the earlier Universe.
This allows astronomers to use it as a cosmic lab to study the history of the Universe in our cosmic backyard.
