Zooming in on VFTS 243

In this video we get to fly out from our home galaxy and into the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way. The LMC is the home of one of the brightest known nebulae, the Tarantula Nebula, that was discovered in the mid-18th century. The Tarantula Nebula hosts the binary system VFTS 243, where this video eventually ends. The system might seem like a lone hot blue star, but the other component is in fact invisible to us: a black hole, weighing at least nine times the mass of our Sun, and about 200 000 times smaller than its stellar companion.

More information and download options: http://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso2210c/

Credit:
ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org)/R. Gendler, ESO/M.-R. Cioni/VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit. Music: John Dyson