A panoramic view of a vast, sculpted area of gas and dust where thousands of stars are being born
has been captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
The image, taken by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, is online at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2001/21/image/a/. The camera
was designed and built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
The photo offers an unprecedented, detailed view of the entire inner region of the fertile, star-forming
30 Doradus Nebula. The mosaic picture shows that ultraviolet radiation and high-speed material
unleashed by the stars in the cluster, called R136 (the large blue blob left of center), are weaving a
tapestry of creation and destruction, triggering the collapse of looming gas and dust clouds and
forming pillar-like structures that incubate newborn stars.
The 30 Doradus Nebula is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located
170,000 light-years from Earth. Nebulas like 30 Doradus are signposts of recent star birth.
High-energy ultraviolet radiation from young, hot, massive stars in R136 causes surrounding gaseous
material to glow. Previous Hubble telescope observations showed that R136 contains several dozen
of the most massive stars known, each about 100 times the mass of the Sun and about 10 times as
hot. These stellar behemoths formed about 2 million years ago.
The stars in R136 produce intense "stellar winds," streams of material traveling at several million
miles an hour. These winds push the gas away from the cluster and compress the inner regions of the
surrounding gas and dust clouds (seen in the image as the pinkish material). The intense pressure
triggers the collapse of parts of the clouds, producing a new star formation around the central cluster.
Most stars in the nursery are not visible because they are still encased in cocoons of gas and dust.
This mosaic image of 30 Doradus consists of five overlapping pictures taken between January 1994
and September 2000 by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. Several color filters enhance
important details in the stars and the nebula. Blue corresponds to the hot stars. The greenish color
denotes hot gas energized by the central cluster of stars. Pink depicts the glowing edges of the gas
and dust clouds facing the cluster, which are being bombarded by winds and radiation.
Reddish-brown represents the cooler surfaces of the clouds, which are not receiving direct radiation
from the central cluster.
Additional information about the Hubble Space Telescope is available at http://www.stsci.edu/hst/.
More information about the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 is available at http://www.stsci.edu/hst/wfpc2.
The Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md., manages space operations for Hubble for
NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The institute is operated by the Association of
Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight
Center, Greenbelt, Md. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation
between NASA and the European Space Agency. JPL is a division of the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena.
