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Learn about the Moon in a great new book New book chronicles the space program. Dave's Universe Year of Pluto. Groups Why Join? Astronomy Day. The Complete Star Atlas. One large and one small, the Magellanic Clouds are familiar sights in the southern sky — and they can teach us a great deal about the Milky Way. But it still felt surreal to marvel at them while standing in a dark Chilean desert.
The clouds are part of the culture and lore of many groups of Indigenous peoples in South America, Australia, and southern Africa, where they were named to represent things like the feathers of rheas, a South American relative of the ostrich; the tracks of celestial animals Setlhako ; a pair of cranes Prolggi ; and an old couple sitting by a campfire Jukara.
This stunning ground-based image of the LMC reveals the largest star-forming region in our Local Group of galaxies: the Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus the bright red patch slightly left of center. This served as the basis of my Ph. Yet I had never seen the clouds in person. My Ph. But my data had arrived on digital tapes in the mail.
Moving to Chile was going to be the start of my own scientific adventure. And my personal encounter with the Magellanic Clouds surely was an unforgettable experience. The SMC is chock-full of obscuring clouds of interstellar dust that block visible light. The Magellanic Clouds Besides being spectacular nighttime objects, the Magellanic Clouds are popular targets for professional astronomers.
There are many reasons for their popularity, including their proximity. This means they are close enough to be studied in detail, yet far enough away that their stars can be approximated as being at uniform distances — unlike those of the Milky Way, where it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees. Northern Hemisphere astronomers are generally more familiar with the Orion Nebula M42 , a nursery for massive stars in our own galaxy.
But, if placed at the distance of the Orion Nebula, 30 Doradus would span across one-fifth the sky, even casting shadows at night! At the center of 30 Doradus is a dense, massive cluster of stars called R, which, with an age less than about 2 million years, houses stars so young that even the most massive members have yet to finish their short lives.
The stars just outside R but still within 30 Doradus formed a few million years earlier, giving them more time to evolve. The light from one of these stars, caught in the act of ending its brief career by exploding as a supernova, famously first reached Earth in At that point, I was in high school and more interested in electric guitars than astronomy. The event, named SN A, kicked off a frenzy of observations and renewed focus on the study of supernova explosions, particularly how they can be used to measure distances.
This culminated in the discovery of dark energy by two supernova survey teams. These lower metallicities align more closely with the conditions found in the early Universe before the evolution and deaths of stars could enrich the interstellar medium giving astronomers an idea of the processes that might have been in action billions of years ago.
Another important feature associated with the Magellanic Clouds is the Magellanic Stream. Extending half way around the Milky Way, this is a tidal tail of gas that has been stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud by an interaction with either the Milky Way or the Large Magellanic Cloud the actual culprit is still a topic of research.
Because the Large Magellanic Cloud is so close, these other astronomical objects could have affected the Milky Way as well. Sign up to our free Launchpad newsletter for a voyage across the galaxy and beyond, every Friday. Read more: A cosmic collision may be coming for our galaxy sooner than we thought. Join us at our online event: Listening to the universe with gravitational waves Join us Thursday 14 October, 6pm BST and available on-demand.
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