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This describes a NASA Hubble Space Telescope mosaic assembled from pictures taken between January 1994 and September 2000.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken a panoramic view of a vast, sculpted region of gas and dust where thousands of stars are forming: the inner part of the 30 Doradus Nebula. The image, from Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, gives an unprecedented, detailed look at the whole inner region of this fertile star-forming nebula. The camera was designed and built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Where it is
30 Doradus lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way 170,000 light-years from Earth. Nebulas like it mark places where stars have recently been born. Their gas glows because of high-energy ultraviolet light from young, hot, massive stars.
The cluster at the center
At the heart of the nebula is a star cluster called R136, the large blue blob left of center in the image. Earlier Hubble observations showed that R136 holds several dozen of the most massive stars known, each about 100 times the mass of the Sun and about 10 times as hot. These giants formed about 2 million years ago.
Creation and destruction
The ultraviolet radiation and fast-moving material pouring out of R136 are both destroying and creating. The cluster's stars blow intense "stellar winds," streams of material moving at several million miles an hour. The winds push gas away from the cluster and squeeze the inner parts of the surrounding clouds of gas and dust, which appear pinkish in the image.
That pressure makes parts of the clouds collapse, setting off a new wave of star formation around the central cluster and building pillar-like structures that incubate newborn stars. Most of the stars in this nursery cannot be seen, because they are still wrapped in cocoons of gas and dust.
Reading the colors
The mosaic combines five overlapping pictures, and several color filters bring out details in the stars and the nebula:
| Color | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Blue | hot stars |
| Greenish | hot gas energized by the central cluster |
| Pink | the glowing edges of clouds facing the cluster, bombarded by its winds and radiation |
| Reddish brown | the cooler surfaces of clouds not directly exposed to the cluster's radiation |
Sources
- NASA/JPL Photojournal, PIA04200, "Doradus Nebula." http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA04200
- HubbleSite news release: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2001/21/image/a/
Licens: CC0 1.0 (offentligt eje) · Bearbejdet efter images.nasa.gov
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