Deep inside the Milky Way’s companion galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud lies a vast complex of stars, gas, and dust. From our vantage point, 170,000 light years away, we see it as a softly-glowing pinkish brain-shaped cloud studded with stars — a description that grossly underdescribes the tremendous beauty of the newly-released Hubble view of it:
Oh, my. Click it to get a bigger version, or go here to get a 26 Mb 4000×4000 pixel version.
What a staggeringly lovely image! And so much to see. More than you’d expect… but that’s part of a surprise I’ll have for you at the end of this post. Bear with me, it’s worth it.
Until then, let me show you a thing or two…
LHA 120-N 11B, as this object is formally called (or just N11B for short), is a giant cloud of star-forming gas, containing as much as 100,000 times the mass of the Sun in gas alone! Inside the cloud, to the lower right, you can see dozens of brilliant blue stars. These are newly-born, massive stars. They burn fiercely hot, blasting the space around them with ultraviolet light and expelling strong winds of gas from their surfaces. Together, these twin waves slam into surrounding material, heating and compressing it. To the upper left of that group of stars you can see what looks like a weather front as the shock waves move through the gas. If this gas is dense enough, it too will collapse and form more stars.
To the extreme upper left of the image is another case of this, but this time from what appears to be a single star. It’s the brightest star in the image, so it’s most likely at the top end of the mass scale for stars, and its heat, light, and wind commensurately stronger. It’s brutal enough to be slamming a region of the cloud light years across! Right around the star itself is more gas, which is most likely left over from the star’s formation itself: a star that massive cannot live for long, and so there hasn’t been time for it to totally blast away its environment. Take a good look at this while you can: in probably less than a million years this star — like almost every other blue star in this entire image — will explode in a titanic supernova event. It will be easily visible to the naked eye, in fact… if you’re fortunate enough to live in the southern hemisphere.
Another fascinating region of the cloud is to the lower left. You can see dark splotches dotting the area; these are dense clouds of gas mixed with dust, a complex opaque molecule formed in both star birth and death. These are the precise spots where stars are being born, collapsing from that material. We see these in almost every gas cloud actively forming stars… and 4.6 billion years ago, our own Sun almost certainly formed in just such a cocoon.
Amazingly, astronomers studying this cloud have found the population consists of three separate generations of stars. The ones in those blobs are merely the youngest, but the most aged stars are only a few million years older. Even the most decrepit of stars in this cloud is only a thousandth as old as the Sun!
Now it’s time for the surprise I promised.
In that first image at the top of this post, turn your attention to the lower right, outside the cloud. In what looks like clear space is a cluster of thousands of jewel-like stars. However, that space is not clear, and, in fact, hints that I’ve been holding out on you. You see, the Hubble image above actually only sees a tiny portion of the entire complex of gas and dust! Check out this much wider field-of-view picture from the Curtis Schmidt 0.6 meter telescope in Chile:
Aha! This object is much, much larger than I’ve been leading you to believe. The brain-shaped region in the Hubble image is actually just that one small part of the far bigger complex called LHA 120-N 11. What we’ve been looking at, N11B, is the region just above the center. The cluster of brilliant stars in the lower right of the Hubble image is actually a massive cluster of newly-born stars occupying the center of the much larger complex. The combined might of those stars is carving out a bubble, a cavity in the middle. The cluster is about 3.5 million years old, and soon stars in it will start exploding as they reach the ends of their lives. What will that do to the gas in that cluster, I wonder?
Incredibly, with all the detail visible in the Hubble image, it’s really only a small fraction of the activity going on in this enormous object. I’ll admit, I was rather stunned when I found that last image. I could tell that the Hubble image was incomplete, and must be part of a larger object, but even so the scale of this amazed me. To see such incredibly fine detail, to see where individual stars are being born and where others are affecting their surroundings… and then to zoom out and see that this must be happening everywhere, all over that vast region. The entire object is several hundred light years across: that’s several quadrillion kilometers, hundreds of trillions of miles. There must be thousands of stars forming in all those clouds, tens of thousands. It’s a stellar factory, churning out baby stars at a ferocious rate.
And yet, with all that, it’s still only the second most massive such object in the Large Magellanic Cloud; the Tarantula Nebula is comfortably heftier.
When I see images like this, I’m reminded quite strongly that the Universe is incredibly complex, beautiful, and — my favorite of all — surprising. The more we look, the more there is to see.
Picture credits: NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain) and C. Aguilera, C. Smith and S. Points/NOAO/AURA/NSF
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:09 am
I do – & I’m looking forward to it! We haven’t seen a supernova here since .. oh .. 1987!
Great picture(s) : magnificent.
Very brain-like indeed – the Great Brain nebula strikes me as a far better name for this than LHA 120-N 11B or even just N11B for short. Even if it does resemble a scene from Futurama rather closely think Giant Brains Versus Nibblonians.
Ah the Large Magellanic Cloud .. LOVE IT!
Not to rub it in for us Southern Hemispherers .. much!
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:12 am
Could it be “A Huge Ever-growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwZL5_xCHxo (music by The Orb)
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:43 am
I’ve noticed that some images of the Tarantula Nebula look an awful lot like the FSM.
I’m jus’ sayin’.
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:43 am
It’s the squishy brain of science!
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:48 am
Gorgeous. Better than a 4th of July fireworks display.
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:49 am
So this is the one that killed the dinosaurs?
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Remember… Scooty Puff Junior sucks!
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:37 pm
THAT IS THE GREETEST!
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Dude, if that’s not pareidolia, we are so screwed.
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:46 pm
“Pathetic human race. Arranging their knowledge by category just made it easier to absorb. Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands! Ha ha ha ha! “
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Why a brain? I see also a lung. It can be a fetus as well, it does look like a brain but it can also look like a stomach.
Who knows…it can be also mitochondria.
LOL.
June 22nd, 2010 at 1:05 pm
“The big brain am winning! I am the greetest! Mwa-ha-ha-ha! I must now leave Earth for no raisin!”
June 22nd, 2010 at 1:23 pm
That’s not a brain! It’s a human fetus.
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2009/9/30/1254310802227/Artwork-from-the-book-A-C-001.jpg
June 22nd, 2010 at 1:36 pm
This post is about 2 days too early. And, judging by the comments so far, that’s* not a moment too soon.
(* where “that” = 10pm /9 central. wheeeeee)
June 22nd, 2010 at 1:40 pm
I know… That’s why I invested in the Scooty Puff Sr.
June 22nd, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Thanks Phil, this is embiggenest reason why I love coming here.
June 22nd, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Is the “little” yellow/white ring to the right in the last photo part of the N-11 complex, too? Or is it a foreground planetary nebula?
June 22nd, 2010 at 3:04 pm
13. Ken B Says:
That’s not a brain! It’s a human fetus.
Where have we seen that before?
June 22nd, 2010 at 3:05 pm
that 26mb version is not 4000 x 4000 it is in fact about 7500 x 7500
June 22nd, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Not gonna lie, I thought it looked like Australia.
That is a very awesome image.
June 22nd, 2010 at 3:49 pm
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all…
June 22nd, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Fool me once Phil! I’m gonna look this up in the libary!
June 22nd, 2010 at 5:29 pm
MmmMmMMMmmm!!! BRAINS!!!
Watch out for space zombies!
June 22nd, 2010 at 5:52 pm
@ J/P = ?
Aw, c’mon. Original star kid, at least! The one from the less sucky movie?
June 22nd, 2010 at 6:41 pm
[...] This astounding new photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a gigantic brain-like formation of gas clouds and star clusters in our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Bad Astronomer Phil Plait has an analysis of the photo with a bit of a surprise at the end: A vast, cosmic cloudy brain looms in a nearby galaxy. [...]
June 22nd, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Kind of looks like the Lights of Zetar.
June 22nd, 2010 at 7:44 pm
Too bad we don’t name stars in other galaxies…I would propose that the newest one be called N00B.
And if you expect me to apologize for that…guess again.
June 22nd, 2010 at 8:53 pm
“That’s not a brain! It’s a human fetus.
There is also a fetus nebula:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080825.html
June 22nd, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Phil, I think you missed the largest concentration of stars in the image. Below the “Brain Nebula” and among the stars in the bottom portion of the picture, more than a dozen faint background galaxies appear! In the extreme bottom left of field is a prominent spiral galaxy with a distorted arm pointing upwards. The 26Mb version of the image makes it easy to pick out the intervening galaxies hiding amongst the scenery. Trillions of stars there. These distant ‘island universes’, millions of light years from Earth make the LMC appear next door, even at 180,00 lys. Goes to show how little dust and gas there is in parts of the LMC.
June 23rd, 2010 at 12:50 am
“You know, I was God once.”
“I saw. You were doing well until everyone died.”
June 23rd, 2010 at 1:06 am
Great write up Phil.
June 23rd, 2010 at 6:04 am
Simply beautiful, all of it.
June 23rd, 2010 at 7:38 am
Reading this made my sunburn sting. >. < Space is just amazing though.
June 23rd, 2010 at 7:59 am
1st Picture… a new definition of “Pinky and The Brain”
Last Picture… If you have a brain it’s always nice to have a body. Who says intelligence comes in only earth life size. Ref. The Black Cloud a book from the sixties about the solar system encountering a nebular cloud.
Captn Tommy
June 23rd, 2010 at 8:02 am
[...] Deep inside the Milky Way’s companion galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud lies a vast complex of stars, gas, and dust. From our vantage point, 170,000 light years away, we see it as a softly-glowing pinkish brain-shaped cloud studded with stars — a description that grossly underdescribes the tremendous beauty of Read ahead [...]
June 23rd, 2010 at 11:19 am
I wonder what the large, greenish globule at center-right is? It’s got a really interesting 3-dimensional shape to it.
June 23rd, 2010 at 5:44 pm
What really strikes me is how *young* this whole thing is. What on earth was all that gas doing for the last 10 billion years or so?
June 23rd, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Ryan H wrote: “I wonder what the large, greenish globule at center-right is? It’s got a really interesting 3-dimensional shape to it.”
http://mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com/2007/04/star-trek-immunity-syndrome.html
June 23rd, 2010 at 6:17 pm
That’s more like it Phil! Thanks for this great post.
June 25th, 2010 at 12:00 am
I’ve been looking through the BA’s old posts (backwards from the first one linked in the 5000 one) and saw this oddly familiar image :
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2005/10/04/remnants-of-the-day/
Rather brain-like too isn’t it?
Also in the Large Magellanic Cloud and labelled N132 D. Curiously enough the LMC appears to be the [50's B-grade SF movie voice on] Realm of the Giant Nebulous Brains!!!! [/50's B-grade SF movie voice off]
June 26th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Amazing image! The whole complex is one of my favourite regions in the LMC, checkout this true colour amateur image by Eddie Trimarchi: http://www.astroshed.com/st10pics/1763.jpg
I think one of the best pictures is the false colour “Dancing Squids” version by the one and only Astrodon:
http://dg-imaging.astrodon.com/gallery/display.cfm?imgID=121