A glance over a starry shoulder

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

Some sort of cos­mic ani­mal glances over its starry shoul­der at a bub­ble of gas and stars in this image of NGC 4214 from the NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Telescope.

What sto­ries or pic­tures do you see hid­ing in this image? Leave a note below.

Explore the innards of NGC 4214, a nearby dwarf galaxy. From glow­ing clouds of gas and dust to the clus­ters of hot blue stars the clouds cre­ate, you can track each step of a star’s evo­lu­tion. Near the outer edges of the irreg­u­lar galaxy, yel­low­ish mid­dle aged stars dom­i­nate the scene. But scat­tered through­out the galaxy, strong ultra­vi­o­let radi­a­tion from young stars causes the neb­u­lae to glow. The stars also stream with fast stel­lar wind that plows into the sur­round­ing gas blow­ing bub­bles in the neb­ula. At the cen­ter of the galaxy, look for a vast heart-shaped bub­ble. A clus­ter of young, hot stars, each more than 10,000 times brighter than our Sun, is caus­ing a cav­ity to form. These mas­sive stars will live short lives. Within a few mil­lion years they will burn through their hydro­gen fuel and explode as super­novae. Another huge star-making com­plex of glow­ing green gas and dust is seen in the upper part of the image; what I see as a horse-type head glanc­ing over a shoulder.

NGC 4214 is con­sid­ered a dwarf galaxy because of its tiny size com­pared to our Milky Way Galaxy. The small galaxy still con­tains mil­lions of stars. It also lacks an over­all struc­ture with no disk nor spi­ral arms. The galaxy is found about 10 mil­lion light-years from Earth in the north­ern con­stel­la­tion Canes Venatici, the Hunt­ing Dogs.

Comments

S 13-05-2011, 08:19

it’s the giant Space Man­tis again!

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