14 DAY TRIAL // A team of astronomers was recently able to capture an impressive image of the Dragon's Head Nebula, which is also known as NGC 2035. The structure is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the dwarf galaxies closest to the Milky Way.
In order to image the nebula, which lies around 160,000 light-years away from our galaxy, experts used the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), at the Paranal Observatory, in Chile. The VLT has four, 8.2-meter Unit Telescopes, and four, 1.8-meter Auxiliary Telescopes.
The view above is focused on an HII emission nebula, which is made to glow by extreme amounts of radiations produced by newborn stars within it. Unlike the Milky Way, which is estimated to produce a single star a year, the LMC produces several celestial fireballs during the same interval.
This nebula is several hundred light-years across. This may not seem like a lot, but consider that the entire LMC is just 14,000 light-years across, as opposed to the Milky Way's staggering 120,000 light-years diameter. Even that pales by comparison to some of the Universe's truly massive galaxies.