Hubble's Festive View of a Grand Star-Forming Region
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - 09:49
in Astronomy & Space
This Hubble picture postcard of hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds is the most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood. The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides 170,000 light-years away in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. The Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 observations were taken Oct. 20-27, 2009.