14 DAY TRIAL // NASA has published a guide of our two nearest galactic neighbors, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, based on data from the Swift space telescope.
These dwarf galaxies orbit the much larger Milky Way, our own galaxy, and only contain a few hundred million stars, compared to the hundreds of billions in our own.
Even though they're quite small, in the grand scheme of things, they're large enough that cataloguing them is a big task.
Astronomers have now put together the most comprehensive survey of the two galaxies, seen in ultraviolet light by NASA's Swift Space Telescope.
The telescope took thousands of images which were later patched together into massive snapshots of our neighbors.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is seen in a 160-megapixel image. The Small Magellanic Cloud fits in a smaller 57-megapixel image.
The new images helped astronomers identify some one million light sources in the larger galaxy and 250,000 in the smaller one.
Only the newest and largest stars are bright in ultraviolet light, normal size ones like our own sun wouldn't even register in the survey.
