 Hubble
Sends Season's Greetings from the Cosmos to Earth
Looking like a colorful holiday card, this image from
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals a vibrant green and red nebula
far from Earth, where nature seems to have put on the traditional
colors of the season. These colors, produced by the light emitted
by oxygen and hydrogen, help astronomers investigate the star-forming
processes in nebulas such as NGC 2080.
NGC 2080, nicknamed "The Ghost Head Nebula," is one
of a chain of star-forming regions lying south of the 30 Doradus
nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud that have attracted special
attention. These regions have been studied in detail with Hubble
and have long been identified as unique star-forming sites. 30 Doradus
is the largest star-forming complex in the whole local group of
galaxies.
The light from the nebula captured in this image is
emitted by two elements, hydrogen and oxygen. The red and the blue
light are from regions of hydrogen gas heated by nearby stars. The
green light on the left comes from glowing oxygen. The energy to
illuminate the green light is supplied by a powerful stellar wind
(a stream of high-speed particles) coming from a massive star just
outside the image. The white region in the center is a combination
of all three emissions and indicates a core of hot, massive stars
in this star-formation region. The intense emission from these stars
has carved a bowl-shaped cavity in the surrounding gas.
In the white region, the two bright areas (the "eyes
of the ghost") - named A1 (left) and A2 (right) - are very hot,
glowing "blobs" of hydrogen and oxygen. The bubble in A1 is produced
by the hot, intense radiation and powerful stellar wind from a single
massive star. A2 has a more complex appearance due to the presence
of more dust, and it contains several hidden, massive stars. The
massive stars in A1 and A2 must have formed within the last 10,000
years, since their natal gas shrouds are not yet disrupted by the
powerful radiation of the newly born stars.
The research team noted that Hubble's superb resolution
is essential to see the various features in the nebula and to better
understand the formation of massive stars in this interesting region.
This "enhanced color" picture is composed of three
narrow-band-filter images obtained March 28, 2000, with Hubble's
Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The colors are red (ionized hydrogen,
H-alpha, 1040 seconds), green (ionized oxygen, 1200 seconds) and
blue (ionized hydrogen, H-beta, 1040 seconds). The image spans 67
x 67 arc-seconds, corresponding to 55 x 55 light-years at the distance
of the Large Magellanic Cloud (168,000 light-years).
Credit: NASA,
ESA & Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri
(Observatoire de Paris, France)
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STScI-PRC01-34
The
Space Telescope Science Institute
is operated by the Association
of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA), for NASA,
under contract with the Goddard
Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project
of international cooperation between NASA and the
European Space Agency (ESA).
