Magellanic Clouds Captured by Planck Satellite

It may look like a close-up of a Vincent van Gogh painting, but this is a portrait of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds as seen through the eyes of the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite.

The Magellanic Clouds, which can only be seen from the southern hemisphere, are two of our nearest neighbors.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is the big red and orange blob near the center of the image, while the Small Magellanic Cloud is the triangular-shaped object in the lower left.

The Planck spacecraft, which operated from 2009 to 2013, studied the sky in microwave and infrared wavelengths.

As the probe examined the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the left over heat from the big bang, it saw the dust between the stars in the Magellanic Clouds and virtually anything else that shone at these frequencies.

This includes many other galaxies, both near and far, as well as interstellar material in the Milky Way.

Interstellar dust in a large star-forming region of the Milky Way known as the Chameleon constellation, can be seen as the mixture of red, orange and yellow clouds in the upper part of the image.

A large dusty filament can also be seen stretching from the dense clouds of Chameleon, in the upper left, towards the opposite corner of the image.

Although it appears to stretch between the two Magellanic Clouds, it is actually part of our own galaxy, a mere 300 light-years away and aligned with our galaxy’s magnetic field.

Read more at Discovery News