Hubble peers into stormy scenes of dark dust in Large Magellanic Cloud!

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

New Delhi: The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has captured yet another stunning view of stormy scenes of a maelstrom of glowing gas and dark dust within one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

As per the ESA, this stormy scene shows a stellar nursery known as N159, an HII region over 150 light-years across. N159 contains many hot young stars. These stars are emitting intense ultraviolet light, which causes nearby hydrogen gas to glow, and torrential stellar winds, which are carving out ridges, arcs, and filaments from the surrounding material.

At the heart of this cosmic cloud lies the Papillon Nebula, a butterfly-shaped region of nebulosity. This small, dense object is classified as a High-Excitation Blob, and is thought to be tightly linked to the early stages of massive star formation.

The image was obtained by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The region was previously imaged by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which also resolved the Papillon Nebula for the first time.

N159 is located over 160,000 light-years away. It resides just south of the Tarantula Nebula (heic1402), another massive star-forming complex within the LMC.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a collaboration between ESA and NASA. Hubble has made more than 1.2 million observations since its launch in 1990.