Latest Mensa constellation Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Using NASA’s Swift satellite, astronomers from NASA and Pennsylvania State University have created the most detailed ultraviolet surveys to-date of the two closest major galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. "We took thousands of images and assembled them into seamless portraits of the main body of each galaxy, resulting in the highest-resolution surveys of the Magellanic Clouds at ultraviolet wavelengths," said...

[Watch Video 1] [Watch Video 2] Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), an irregular galaxy that shares some features with spiral galaxies, is known for its array of star-forming regions. One of those regions, LHA 120-N 11 (N11), captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, offers proof that the LMC is producing noticeable signs that stellar nurseries within are still hard at work. The LMC is in an ideal position for astronomers to study...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA has released a hauntingly beautiful composite image showing a superbubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC is a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 160,000 light years from Earth. A superbubble is a cavity, filled with 106 Kelvin gas blown into the interstellar medium by multiple supernovae and stellar winds, hundreds of light years across. These cavities are carved out of the surrounding gas by the...

The Magellanic Stream is an arc of hydrogen gas spanning more than 100 degrees of the sky as it trails behind the Milky Way's neighbor galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has long been thought to be the dominant gravitational force in forming the Stream by pulling gas from the Clouds. A new computer simulation by Gurtina Besla (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and her colleagues now shows, however, that the Magellanic Stream resulted...

A spectacular new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image "” one of the largest ever released of a star-forming region "” highlights N11, part of a complex network of gas clouds and star clusters within our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. This region of energetic star formation is one of the most active in the nearby Universe.The Large Magellanic Cloud contains many bright bubbles of glowing gas. One of the largest and most spectacular has the name LHA 120-N 11, from its...

Astronomers often turn their telescopes to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the closest galaxies to our own Milky Way, in their quest to understand the Universe. In this spectacular new image from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, a celestial menagerie of different objects and phenomena in part of the LMC is on display, ranging from vast globular clusters to the remains left by brilliant supernovae explosions. This fascinating observation provides...

A giant stream of gas flowing from neighbor galaxies around our own Milky Way is much longer and older than previously thought, astronomers have discovered. The new revelations provide a fresh insight on what started the gaseous intergalactic streamer.The astronomers used the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to fill important gaps in the picture of gas streaming outward from the Magellanic Clouds. The first evidence of such a flow, named the Magellanic...

As if reaching out with a come-hither motion, a giant gas finger emanating from two neighboring galaxies has hooked into the starry disk of the Milky Way and is pulling all three galaxies closer. This extremity of hydrogen gas is actually the pointy end of the so-called Leading Arm of gas that streams ahead of two irregular galaxies called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The fate of these nearby galaxies, which are impacted by the Milky Way's gravity, has been somewhat...

Cambridge, MA - The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are two of the Milky Way's closest neighboring galaxies. A stunning sight in the southern hemisphere, they were named after Ferdinand Magellan, who explored those waters in the 16th century. For hundreds of years, these galaxies were considered satellites of the Milky Way, gravitationally bound to our home galaxy. New research by Gurtina Besla (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and her colleagues...

Seattle, WA - The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are two of the Milky Way's closest neighboring galaxies. Both are visible only in the southern hemisphere. By studying their orbits, astronomers can learn about both the histories of the Clouds and the structure of the Milky Way (from its influence on the Clouds' motions). Astronomers Nitya Kallivayalil and Charles Alcock (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Roeland van der Marel (Space Telescope...