Wispy Portrait

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

Often when we look deep into these star clouds, we stop see­ing pat­terns. It’s thrilling to get caught up in the swirls of gas and wispy clouds of dust. In this image of N 180B from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope, we find splashes of color from intense blues and pur­ples to vivid shades of red and orange.

N 180B is a star-making region in the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud. The LMC is a satel­lite galaxy to our Milky Way about 160,000 light-years away toward the con­stel­la­tion of Dorado. The LMC is full of gas and dust; the per­fect com­bi­na­tion for mak­ing new stars. N 180B is home to some of the bright­est known star clus­ters. Some of these stars shine brighter than a mil­lion of our Suns put together. The light and ultra­vi­o­let radi­a­tion from these hot, blue stars cause the neb­ula to glow by excit­ing gas atoms.

Explore the image. Can you find giant stalks of gas and dust stick­ing out into the neb­ula. These clouds of squished gas and dust are called ele­phant trunks. If the pres­sure from the nearby stars is enough and it pushes enough gas and dust into an area, grav­ity might draw that mate­r­ial into a sin­gle area. A star might be born by this process. Find the stream­ers that run the length of the neb­ula. These stream­ers show the strong solar winds from the hot stars that blow through this nebula.