| NASA Center: |
Hubble Space Telescope Center |
|---|
| Image # : |
PR98-25 |
|---|
| Date : |
09/24/1997
|
|---|
|
Title
N81 in the Small Magellanic Cloud
Full Description
A NASA Hubble Space Telescope "family portrait" of young, ultra-bright
stars nested in their embryonic cloud of glowing gases. The celestial
maternity ward, called N81, is located 200,000 light-years away in the
Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a small irregular satellite galaxy of our
Milky Way.
Hubble's exquisite resolution allows astronomers to pinpoint 50
separate stars tightly packed in the nebula's core within a 10 light-
year diameter - slightly more than twice the distance between earth and
the nearest star to our sun. The closest pair of stars is only 1/3 of a
light-year apart (0.3 arcseconds in the sky). This furious rate of mass
loss from these super-hot stars is evident in the Hubble picture that
reveals dramatic shapes sculpted in the nebula's wall of glowing gases
by violent stellar winds and shock waves.
A pair of bright stars in the center of the nebula is pouring out most
of the ultraviolet radiation to make the nebula glow. Just above them,
a small dark knot is all that is left of the cold cloud of molecular
hydrogen and dust the stars were born from. Dark absorption lanes of
residual dust trisect the nebula. The nebula offers a unique
opportunity for a close-up glimpse at the firestorm' accompanying the
birth of extremely massive stars, each blazing with the brilliance of
300,000 of our suns.
Such galactic fireworks were much more common billions of years ago in
the early universe, when most star formation took place. The "natural-
color" view was assembled from separate images taken with the Wide
Field and Planetary Camera 2, in ultraviolet light and two narrow
emission lines of ionized Hydrogen (H-alpha, H-beta).
Keywords
Hubble Space Telescope HST Small Magellanic Cloud Milky Way Nebula Wide Field Planetary Camera WFPC N81
Subject Category
Deep Space Studies, Hubble,
Reference Numbers
- Center:
HSTI
- Center Number:
PR98-25
- GRIN DataBase Number:
GPN-2000-000951
Source Information
- Creator/Photographer: NASA, ESA, Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri Paris Observatory France
- Original Source: DIGITAL
| Resolution | Format | Width
(Pixels) | Height
(Pixels) | Size
(KBytes) |
Thumbnail |
.jpg |
91 |
91 |
15 |
Small |
.jpg |
650 |
650 |
458 |
Medium |
.jpg |
1523 |
1523 |
1,455 |
Large |
.jpg |
731 |
731 |
496 |
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Updated October 31, 2002
• History Questions: NASA History Office
• Responsible NASA Official: Steve Garber
• Author: Michael Hahn. Editor: Dwayne A. Day
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