NGC 2074: The Seahorse of the Large Magellanic Cloud

The Seahorse of the Large Magellanic Cloud 

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio (STScI)

Explanation: It may look like a grazing seahorse, but the dark object toward the image right is actually a pillar of smoky dust about 20 light years long.

The curiously-shaped dust structure occurs in our neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud, in a star forming region very near the expansive Tarantula Nebula.

The energetic nebula is creating a star cluster, NGC 2074, whose center is visible just off the top of the image in the direction of the neck of the seahorse.

The representative color image was taken in 2008 by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in honour of Hubble's 100,000th trip around the Earth.

As young stars in the cluster form, their light and winds will slowly erode the dust pillars away over the next million years.

ESA Hubble 24th Birthday Image: Monkey Head Nebula

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

To celebrate its 24th year in orbit, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has released a beautiful new image of part of NGC 2174, also known as the Monkey Head Nebula.

This colourful region is filled with young stars embedded within bright wisps of cosmic gas and dust.

Orion Nebula

NGC 2174 lies about 6400 light-years away in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter).

Hubble previously viewed this part of the sky back in 2001, creating a stunning image released in 2011, and the space telescope has now revisited the region to celebrate its 24th year of operation.

Nebulae are a favourite target for Hubble. Their colourful plumes of gas and fiery bright stars create ethereally beautiful pictures.

Tarantula Nebula

Some of the most famous of Hubble's images have been of nebulae, for example, the telescope's 22nd and 23rd anniversary images of the Tarantula and Horsehead nebulae, and its festive 2012 image of planetary nebula NGC 5189.

The detail shown in this image lies within NGC 2174, a nebula which gets its more common name, the Monkey Head Nebula, from its curiously familiar shape when viewed in wide-field images.

The nebula is a violent stellar nursery, packed with the ingredients needed for star formation.

However, the recipe for cooking up new stars isn't very efficient and most of the ingredients are wasted as the cloud of gas and dust disperses.

This process is accelerated by the presence of fiercely hot young stars which trigger high velocity winds that help to blow the gas outwards.

Horsehead Nebula

A vibrant palette of colours can be seen in this new image of NGC 2174. Dark brown and rust-coloured dust clouds billow outwards, framed against a background of bright blue gas.

These striking hues are formed by combining several Hubble images taken with different coloured filters, to reveal a broad range of colours not normally visible to the human eye.

The icing on this cosmic birthday cake takes the form of young white and pink stars sprinkled amongst the glowing clouds, pushing away the dark stellar nurseries in which they formed.

The key ingredient in NGC 2174 is hydrogen gas, which is ionised by the ultraviolet radiation emitted by the young stars. As a result, this region is also known as an HII region—a large cloud of ionised gas.

ESA Herschel Image: Large Dusty Magellanic Space Cloud

This image shows the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy in infrared light as seen by ESA's Herschel Space Observatory, a mission with important NASA contributions, and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

In the instruments' combined data, this nearby dwarf galaxy looks like a fiery, circular explosion.

Rather than fire, however, those ribbons are actually giant ripples of dust spanning tens or hundreds of light-years.

Significant fields of star formation are noticeable in the centre, just left of center and at right.

The brightest centre-left region is called 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula, for its appearance in visible light.

Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech

NASA Hubble Watches Star Clusters on a Collision Course

This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of a pair of star clusters that are believed to be in the early stages of merging.

The clusters lie in the gigantic 30 Doradus nebula, which is 170,000 light-years from Earth.

The Hubble observations, made with the Wide Field Camera 3, were taken Oct. 20-27, 2009.

The blue colour is light from the hottest, most massive stars; the green from the glow of oxygen; and the red from fluorescing hydrogen.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, R. O'Connell (University of Virginia), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee

Astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have caught two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging.

The clusters are 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way, a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way.

What at first was thought to be only one cluster in the core of the massive star-forming region 30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula) has been found to be a composite of two clusters that differ in age by about one million years.

The entire 30 Doradus complex has been an active star-forming region for 25 million years, and it is currently unknown how much longer this region can continue creating new stars. Smaller systems that merge into larger ones could help to explain the origin of some of the largest known star clusters.

Lead scientist Elena Sabbi of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., and her team began looking at the area while searching for runaway stars, fast-moving stars that have been kicked out of their stellar nurseries where they first formed.

"Stars are supposed to form in clusters, but there are many young stars outside 30 Doradus that could not have formed where they are; they may have been ejected at very high velocity from 30 Doradus itself," Sabbi said.

She then noticed something unusual about the cluster when looking at the distribution of the low-mass stars detected by Hubble.

It is not spherical, as was expected, but has features somewhat similar to the shape of two merging galaxies where their shapes are elongated by the tidal pull of gravity.

Hubble’s circumstantial evidence for the impending merger comes from seeing an elongated structure in one of the clusters, and from measuring a different age between the two clusters.

According to some models, the giant gas clouds out of which star clusters form may fragment into smaller pieces.

Once these small pieces precipitate stars, they might then interact and merge to become a bigger system. This interaction is what Sabbi and her team think they are observing in 30 Doradus.

ESA Hubble Image: The Tarantula Nebula

European Space Agency: Judy Schmidt

Turning its eye to the Tarantula Nebula, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken this close-up of the outskirts of the main cloud of the Nebula.

The bright wispy structures are the signature of an environment rich in ionized hydrogen gas, called H II by astronomers.

In reality these appear red, but the choice of filters and colours of this image, which includes exposures both in visible and infrared light, make the gas appear green.

These regions contain recently formed stars, which emit powerful ultraviolet radiation that ionizes the gas around them.

These clouds are ephemeral as eventually the stellar winds from the newborn stars and the ionization process will blow away the clouds, leaving stellar clusters like the Pleiades.

Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of our neighboring galaxies, and situated at a distance of 170,000 light-years away from Earth, the Tarantula Nebula is the brightest known nebula in the Local Group of galaxies.

It is also the largest (around 650 light-years across) and most active star-forming region known in our group of galaxies, containing numerous clouds of dust and gas and two bright star clusters.

Another recent Hubble image shows a large part of the nebula immediately adjacent to this field of view.

The cluster at the Tarantula nebula’s center is relatively young and very bright. While it is outside the field of view of this image, the energy from it is responsible for most of the brightness of the Nebula, including the part we see here.

The nebula is in fact so luminous that if it were located within 1,000 light-years from Earth, it would cast shadows on our planet.

The Tarantula Nebula was host to the closest supernova ever detected since the invention of the telescope, supernova 1987A, which was visible to the naked eye.