NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a cluster of young, ultra-bright stars in the stellar nursery known as N81 located 200,000 light-years from Earth in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The latter is a small irregular satellite galaxy of our Milky Way and one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye.
That’s right, you don’t need a telescope to see the SMC, as it is visible from the entire Southern Hemisphere and can be fully glimpsed low above the southern horizon from latitudes south of about 15° north. It’s located across the constellation of Tucana and part of Hydrus, showing up as a faint hazy patch that looks similar to a detached piece of the Milky Way.
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The SMC contains a central bar structure, which could have once been a barred spiral galaxy that was disrupted by the Milky Way to become somewhat irregular. You can also observe a bridge of gas connecting the Small Magellanic Cloud with the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which offers evidence of tidal interaction between the two.
