NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Captures Milky Way's Glittering Neighbour

American space agency NASA's Hubble Space Telescope recently captured a stunning image of a small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), one of the Milky Way's nearest neighbors.

The SMC is a dwarf galaxy close to the Milky Way that is around 200,000 light-years away from Earth and is home to hundreds of millions of stars. Together with the Large Magellanic Cloud, it forms a pair that may be viewed from some northern latitudes but is best seen from the southern hemisphere.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration shared the image on Instagram, which showed an electric sea of stars glistening against a backdrop of pinpricks of light.

"The Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, but this image focuses on just a small fraction of them. These stars comprise the open cluster NGC 376, which has a total mass of only about 3,400 times that of the Sun. Open clusters, as the name suggests, are loosely bound and sparsely populated," the space agency wrote in the caption of the post.

Take a look at our intergalactic neighbor's light display:

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As per the caption of the post, this distinguishes open clusters from globular clusters, which generally appear as a continuous blur of starlight at their centres because they are so crammed with stars. In the case of NGC 376, individual stars are clearly discernable even in the most densely populated parts of this image.

As the description of the image the space agency wrote, "The deep blackness of space is disrupted by sprinkles of brightly coloured blue, green, and white stars throughout the image. Near the centre of the image, a large globular collection of similarly coloured stars shines brightly."

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), also known as Nubecula Minor, is one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbours and one of the farthest objects that can be seen with the naked eyes.