Blowing Bubbles

Credit: NASA, ESA, Moham­mad Heydari-Malayeri (Obser­va­toire de Paris, France)

New stars in N83B are blow­ing bub­bles in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope.

The newly born, bright stars of N83B are blow­ing out intense radi­a­tion, sculpt­ing the par­ent star clouds with pow­er­ful winds. Also known as NGC 1748, the giant stars resem­ble the eyes of some beast with a giant maw. Explore the neb­ula of N83B. Leave a note below on what you see in this image.

The bright stars within the neb­ula are mas­sive. The star at the cen­ter of the neb­ula looks dim but it is more than 30 times more mas­sive than our Sun and 200,000 times brighter. This star is the big bub­ble blower in the neb­ula cre­at­ing an open­ing about 25 light-years in diam­e­ter. For scale, that is about the size of the famous Orion Neb­ula. The hottest star in the region is more mas­sive still; more than 45 times more mas­sive than our Sun. Zoom into the bright­est part of the neb­ula just above the cen­ter. This bright area is only two light-years across. The small size and intense bright­ness mean that it is very young. The pink arc below N83B could be a ridge of stel­lar wind pushed through the glow­ing gas by the mas­sive star. Zoom through the larger neb­ula to the right of N83B. This much larger neb­ula, cut through by a lane of dust, is known as DEM22d.

Astronomers believe that stars are born from neb­u­lae such as N83B. As gas and dust col­lect, grav­ity pulls the mate­r­ial together. If enough mass is gath­ered into one area, the cloud begins to glow with its own heat and a star is born. These stars have just emerged from their cocoon of gas and dust. Astronomers are lucky to catch the stars at this stage. Because of their mas­sive size, the stars evolve rapidly, blow­ing away the neb­ula sur­round­ing them. But view­ing them too soon and astronomers can­not see them.

N83B is a com­pact star-forming region in the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud, a neigh­bor­ing irreg­u­lar dwarf galaxy, about 165,000 light-years from Earth. The LMC can eas­ily be seen with the naked eye as a faint cloud from the South­ern Hemi­sphere in the con­stel­la­tions of Dorado and Mensa.