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During its lifetime, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured stunning imagery and other groundbreaking data that have shown us how and where stars are born within clouds of gas. It is far from a peaceful process. The Hubble image shown on the front reveals how young, massive, energetic stars sculpt and illuminate their birthplace with powerful winds and searing ultraviolet radiation. The image is nicknamed the "Cosmic Reef", because it resembles an undersea world.
The large, red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, approximately 163 000 light-years away. The sparkling centerpiece of NGC 2014 is a grouping of bright, hefty stars, each 10 to 20 times more massive than our Sun. The stars’ ultraviolet radiation heats the surrounding dense gas. The massive stars also unleash fierce winds of charged particles that blast away lower-density gas, forming the bubble-like structures seen on the right.
The blue areas in NGC 2014 reveal the glow of oxygen, heated to nearly 20 000 degrees Fahrenheit by the blast of ultraviolet light. The cooler, red gas indicates the presence of hydrogen and nitrogen. By contrast, the seemingly isolated blue nebula at lower left (NGC 2020) has been shaped by a solitary mammoth star. This young, massive star, called a Wolf-Rayet, has ejected its outer layers of gas, exposing its searing-hot core, making it roughly 200,000 times brighter than our Sun.
Star-forming regions generally last tens of millions of years. Star birth in this region appears to have just started, with a robust episode of newly formed stars, about 5 million years ago. The star-birth process is the same throughout the universe. Though most stars have lower masses, it is the rare massive stars, through their strong winds and energetic radiation, that shape these stellar nurseries.
The portrait features the giant nebula NGC 2014 and its neighbour NGC 2020 which together form part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way
This image celebrates Hubble's 30 years of exploring the heavens.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI
Image enhancement: Jean-Baptiste Faure
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