All of a glow

摘要

It looks like a detail in Van Gogh's famous painting Cafe Terrace at Night. But glowing in the centre of this image is the Large Magellanic Cloud - one of our galaxy's nearest neighbours, a mere 160,000 light years from Earth. With a mass about 10 billion times that of our sun, the cloud is around a hundredth the size of the Milky Way. You can see it unaided in the southern hemisphere as a faint glow between the constellations of Dorado and Mensa. The Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Suf i observed the cloud in around AD 964, and then more than 500 years later it was spotted by the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, after whom the cloud is named.