NASA's Hubble Space Telescope produced this image of a glowing gas cloud, a star factory referred to as a nebula, in a nearby galaxy.

The glowing cloud and its wispy filaments, called Hubble-V, stretches about 200 light-years across and resides about 1.6 million light-years away. The image, taken in ultraviolet light, reveals a dense knot of dozens of ultra-hot stars nestled in the nebula, each glowing 100,000 times brighter than our Sun.

The stars have existed for about 4 million years. Our Sun, for comparison, has entered its middle age at about 4.6 billion years.

The small, irregular host galaxy, called NGC 6822, is one of the Milky Way's closest neighbors and considered prototypical of the earliest, relatively unorganized "fragmentary galaxies" that inhabited the young universe. The galaxy is in the constellation Sagittarius.

Astronomers hope the image will provide insight into the fierce birth of stars as may have occurred more commonly in the early universe.

The researchers released the image on Dec. 6, but it represents the combined product of two images taken in 1996 and 1997.

C. Robert O'Dell of Vanderbilt University led a science team that produced one of the original images; Luciana Bianchi of Johns Hopkins University and Osservatorio Astronomico, Torinese, Italy, led the other.

The newly released color image originated from The Hubble Heritage Team at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble.

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