Fluttering in the Breeze

Credit: NASA and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

Glow­ing strands of gas and dust, like the hair of a god­dess, stream from N44C, a group of hot, young stars in the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud.

Explore the image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. N44C is part of a much big­ger star-making neb­ula in the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud, includ­ing mas­sive hot stars and super­bub­bles blown out from mul­ti­ple super­novae explosions.

Wan­der from the wispy fil­a­ments of glow­ing gas toward the bright haze in the cen­ter. It’s this haze that intrigues sci­en­tists. The star caus­ing this whole neb­ula to glow is unusu­ally hot, more than 135,000 degrees Fahren­heit. The most mas­sive stars, rang­ing from 10 to 50 times more mas­sive than our Sun, have tem­per­a­tures up to about 90,000 degrees Fahren­heit. Ideas raised by sci­en­tists as to the cause of this extreme heat range from neu­tron stars to black holes.

Fil­a­ments at the top right of the image sur­round a Wolf-Rayet star, a kind of rare star with high winds of charged par­ti­cles. The shock of the stel­lar wind slam­ming into the calm sur­round­ing gas causes the neb­ula to glow.

N44C is found about 155,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud, an irreg­u­lar galaxy vis­i­ble as a faint “cloud” from the south­ern hemi­sphere. The LMC is the third clos­est galaxy to our Milky Way Galaxy about one-tenth the size of the Milky Way.