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Hubble Sees Huge Stellar Nursery in Nearby Galaxy
By SPACE.com Staff
posted: 07:01 am ET
05 January 2001
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hubble_galaxy_010104 A newly released Hubble Space Telescope image shows a vast and active star-forming region named Hubble X. The ring-shaped region is bursting with new stars, researchers said. Hubble X is seen in the new image, released Jan. 4, as a bright window inside a glowing cloud of gas and dust, all part of a large galaxy called NGC 6822. The galaxy is in the constellation Sagittarius, some 1.6 million light-years away. It is one our Milky Way Galaxy's closest neighbors. Researchers said the star-forming region Hubble X is about 110 light-years across, dwarfing a similar region in the Milky Way, known as the Orion Nebula. In fact, a small bright cloud near the bottom of the image is about the same size as the Orion Nebula. Within Hubble X, thousands of newly formed stars huddle around a central point. The brightest of these young stars appear as numerous bright white dots. The rapid star formation in Hubble X occurred only about 4 million years ago -- a heartbeat on the astronomical time scale. Intense ultraviolet radiation from massive stars in Hubble X causes the gas cloud to glow. The Hubble X image was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in September 1997 by C. Robert O'Dell of Vanderbilt University, along with colleagues.
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