| NASA Center: |
Hubble Space Telescope Center |
|---|
| Image # : |
PR00-01 |
|---|
| Date : |
01/06/2000
|
|---|
|
Title
Fireworks of Star Formation Light Up a Galaxy
Full Description
Located some 13 million light-years from Earth, NGC 4214 is currently
forming clusters of new stars from its interstellar gas and dust. In
this Hubble image, we can see a sequence of steps in the formation and
evolution of stars and star clusters. The picture was created from
exposures taken in several color filters with Hubble's Wide Field
Planetary Camera 2.
NGC 4214 contains a multitude of faint stars covering most of the
frame, but the picture is dominated by filigreed clouds of glowing gas
surrounding bright stellar clusters. The youngest of these star
clusters are located at the lower right of the picture, where they
appear as about half a dozen bright clumps of glowing gas. Young, hot
stars have a whitish to bluish color in the Hubble image, because of
their high surface temperatures, ranging from 10,000 up to about 50,000
degrees Celsius.
The radiation and wind forces from the young stars literally blow
bubbles in the gas. Over millions of years, the bubbles increase in
size as the stars inside them grow older. Moving to the lower left
from the youngest clusters, we find an older star cluster, around which
a gas bubble has inflated to the point that there is an obvious cavity
around the central cluster.
The most spectacular feature in the Hubble picture lies near the center
of NGC 4214. This object is a cluster of hundreds of massive blue
stars, each of them more than 10,000 times brighter than our own Sun. A
vast heart-shaped bubble, inflated by the combined stellar winds and
radiation pressure, surrounds the cluster. The expansion of the bubble
is augmented as the most massive stars in the center reach the ends of
their lives and explode as supernovae.
The principal astronomers are:
John MacKenty, Jesus Maiz-Apellaniz (Space Telescope Science
Institute), Colin Norman (Johns Hopkins University), Nolan Walborn
(Space Telescope Science Institute), Richard Burg (Johns Hopkins
University), Richard Griffiths (Carnegie Mellon University), and
Rosemary Wyse (Johns Hopkins University).
Keywords
Hubble Space Telescope HST Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 WFPC Supernova
Subject Category
Deep Space Studies, Hubble,
Reference Numbers
- Center:
HSTI
- Center Number:
PR00-01
- GRIN DataBase Number:
GPN-2000-000877
Source Information
- Creator/Photographer: NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team
- Original Source: DIGITAL
| Resolution | Format | Width
(Pixels) | Height
(Pixels) | Size
(KBytes) |
Thumbnail |
.jpg |
95 |
64 |
14 |
Small |
.jpg |
681 |
454 |
452 |
Medium |
.jpg |
1064 |
710 |
1,715 |
Large |
.jpg |
1596 |
1065 |
1,077 |
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Updated October 31, 2002
• History Questions: NASA History Office
• Responsible NASA Official: Steve Garber
• Author: Michael Hahn. Editor: Dwayne A. Day
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