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	Hubble Unveils Hotbed of Star Birth By Jeff Kanipe Special to space.com posted: 06:47 am ET 29 September 1999

hubble_990929All clouds of glowinginterstellar gas are, in a way, like icebergs. Visually, we see just thepart that peeks above the surface in a very narrow part of the spectralocean. But infrared imagery enables astronomers to look below the surfaceat what makes the gas glow, thus exposing the true depths of star formation.

A series of images takenby the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer(NICMOS) of a nebula in a neighboring galaxy has essentially stripped awaythe dust and gas we see topically, revealing clusters of massive youngstars in their birth throes.

The main image was takenby HST's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), and represents a visiblelight view of 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula, which islocated in the Large Magellanic Cloud in the southern sky. To the nakedeye, 30 Doradus appears as a fuzzy star, but closer examination with atelescope shows that it is comprised of a bright star cluster, catalogedas R136, surrounded by wispy nebulosity.

The montage of images atupper left and right are what we would see if we had infrared vision. Infraredimages penetrate dense interstellar dust and thus unveil warm pockets ofgas heated by embedded hot, young stars. What we get is an unimpeded viewof the turbulent birth of these stars.

Each square in the montagesis 15.5 light-years across; the entire image spans a little over 165 light-years.The whole of the 30 Doradus Nebula spans a region some 1,000 light-yearsin diameter.

Both the infrared and visible-lightviews reveal several "dust pillars" projecting toward R136, some with brightstars at their tips. Similar features were seen in earlier HST images ofnebulae, most notably the Eagle Nebula. The pillars are thought to formfrom high-speed material driven outward by the energetic radiation of massivestars in R136. The pressure causes the heads of some of the pillars tocollapse into still more stars in an ongoing process that, millions ofyears hence, will produce even more star clusters.