Today’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week brings a distant stellar birthplace into focus. This gigantic cloud of cold hydrogen gas is called N159, and it’s located about 160 000 light-years away in the constellation Dorado. N159 is one of the most massive star-forming clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is the largest of the small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.
This image shows just a portion of the N159 star-forming complex. The entire complex stretches over 150 light-years across. To put that into perspective, 150 light-years is nearly 10 million times the distance between Earth and the Sun!
In the subzero interior of this gas cloud, subjected to the crushing pressure of gravity, young stars begin to gleam in the darkness. Particularly hot and high-mass stars illuminate their birthplaces with red light. This red glow is characteristic of excited hydrogen atoms, to which Hubble is exquisitely sensitive.
Though some of the bright stars in the cloud appear to be blanketed with reddish gas, others seem to lie at the centre of a reddish bubble, through which the dark backdrop of space is visible. These bubbles are evidence of stellar feedback, in which young stars fry their habitats with high-energy radiation and blow bubbles with their intense stellar winds.
A previous Hubble image of the full N159 star-forming cloud was released in 2016. This version incorporates an additional wavelength of light to highlight the hot gas that surrounds newborn stars.
[Image Description: A field filled with stars and covered by clouds of gas and dust. The centre and left side are totally blanketed with billowing, bright red clouds. They are opaque some places — showing clusters of stars forming within — and transparent others. Small patches are dark black in colour, while a large cloud below the centre is mostly pale blue. The right side of the view, mostly gas-free, glitters with stars near and far.]