Hubble's latest view of the Large Magellanic Cloud unveils a dazzling star cluster filled with glowing gas and newborn stars.
This week's Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week showcases a misty panorama of stars within a striking cluster. The view comes from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy positioned about 160,000 light-years from Earth in the constellations Dorado and Mensa. Containing a mass estimated at 10-20% that of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the many smaller galaxies that orbit our own.
Within the Large Magellanic Cloud lie several vast star-forming regions, where giant clouds of gas gather and collapse to create new stars. The image highlights part of N11, the galaxy's second-largest stellar nursery. (The Tarantula Nebula, which holds the title as the most extensive and active star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, is another well-known Hubble target.) Here, brilliant young stars illuminate the surrounding gas and reshape nearby dust clouds with intense ultraviolet light.
This image marries observations made roughly 20 years apart, a testament to Hubble's longevity. The first set of observations, which were carried out in 2002-2003, capitalized on the exquisite sensitivity and resolution of the then-newly-installed Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). Astronomers turned Hubble toward the N11 star cluster to do something that had never been done before at the time: catalogue all the stars in a young cluster with masses between 10% of the Sun's mass and 100 times the Sun's mass.
The second set of observations came from Hubble's newest camera, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). These images focus on the dusty clouds that permeate the cluster, offering a new perspective on cosmic dust.