A team of astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile has captured an image of two distinctive glowing gas clouds in the neighboring galaxy: red-hued NGC 2014 and blue NGC 2020.
This VLT image reveals two glowing clouds of gas – NGC 2014, right, and NGC 2020 (ESO).
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is an irregular dwarf galaxy located only about 163,000 light-years from our Milky Way Galaxy. This proximity makes it a very important target for astronomers, as it can be studied in far more detail than more distant systems.
The LMC contains less than one tenth of the mass of the Milky Way, and spans just 14,000 light-years.
The galaxy is actively producing new stars. Some of its star-forming regions can even be seen with the naked eye, for example, the famous Tarantula Nebula.
The pink-tinged cloud on the right, NGC 2014, is a glowing cloud of mostly hydrogen gas. It contains a cluster of hot young stars. The energetic radiation from these new stars strips electrons from the atoms within the surrounding hydrogen gas, ionizing it and producing a characteristic red glow.
In addition to this strong radiation, massive young stars also produce powerful stellar winds that eventually cause the gas around them to disperse and stream away.
To the left of the main cluster, a single brilliant and very hot star seems to have started this process, creating a cavity that appears encircled by a bubble-like structure called NGC 2020. The distinctive bluish color of this rather mysterious object is again created by radiation from the hot star – this time by ionizing oxygen instead of hydrogen.
The strikingly different colors of NGC 2014 and NGC 2020 are the result of both the different chemical makeup of the surrounding gas and the temperatures of the stars that are causing the clouds to glow. The distances between the stars and the respective gas clouds also play a role.
