1 min read

Hubble Spots Bright Splash of Stars Amid Ripples of Gas and Dust

Bright blue-white cluster of stars at upper right, surrounded by field of dimmer stars and rusty-red gas and dust clouds
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Bianchi (Johns Hopkins University); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

Open cluster KMHK 1231 is a group of stars loosely bound by gravity. Seen in the upper right of this Hubble Space Telescope image, this cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud is surrounded by a crimson nebula of gas and dust extending across the image, where new stars may someday form. Orange and red in this image indicates visible and near-infrared light, respectively.

Open clusters are found in spiral and irregular galaxies, where star formation is common. They tend to form from the same cloud of gas and dust, so their stars share characteristics like age and chemical composition, providing excellent laboratories for studying how stars form and evolve. After a few million years, they may disperse into their galaxies. Hubble observed this particular cluster as part of a program to examine how ultraviolet light is absorbed by the material that exists in space between Earth and the Large Magellanic Cloud. This information helps astronomers discover how much light objects in the satellite galaxy to the Milky Way truly emanate, critical to determining the characteristics of these objects.

Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
301-286-1940

Share

Details

Last Updated
Jun 09, 2023
Editor
NASA Hubble Mission Team
Contact
NASA Hubble Mission Team

Related Terms

Explore More

An artist's concept of the Wind spacecraft shows the spacecraft on the left outside Earth's magnetosphere, shown as a blue bubble extending around Earth.
5 min read

30 Years On, NASA’s Wind Is a Windfall for Studying our Neighborhood in Space

Article2 days ago
The top-left half of the image is a Hubble Space Telescope view of a 100-billion-mile-wide disk of dust around the summer star Vega. The disk is represented in blue. The color trails to white as we get closer to the center of the disk. The black spot at the center blocks out the bright glow of the hot young star. The disk is perfectly circular because we are looking down on top of it. The lower-right half of the image is a view from the James Webb Space Telescope, which reveals the glow of warm dust in the disk's halo that is colored orange. The disk is brighter toward the center. There is a notable dip in surface brightness between the inner and outer disk.
6 min read

NASA’s Hubble, Webb Probe Surprisingly Smooth Disk Around Vega

Article2 days ago
6 min read

Why NASA’s SPHEREx Mission Will Make ‘Most Colorful’ Cosmic Map Ever

The space telescope will detect over 100 colors from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. Here’s what astronomers will do with all that color. NASA’s SPHEREx mission won’t be the first space telescope to observe hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies when it launches no later than April 2025, but it will be […]

Article3 days ago
Keep Exploring

Discover More Topics From NASA

James Webb Space Telescope

The image is divided horizontally by an undulating line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively clear upper portion. Speckled across both portions is a starfield, showing innumerable stars of many sizes. The smallest of these are small, distant, and faint points of light. The largest of these appear larger, closer, brighter, and more fully resolved with 8-point diffraction spikes. The upper portion of the image is blueish, and has wispy translucent cloud-like streaks rising from the nebula below. The orangish cloudy formation in the bottom half varies in density and ranges from translucent to opaque. The stars vary in color, the majority of which have a blue or orange hue. The cloud-like structure of the nebula contains ridges, peaks, and valleys – an appearance very similar to a mountain range. Three long diffraction spikes from the top right edge of the image suggest the presence of a large star just out of view.

Perseverance Rover

Parker Solar Probe

Juno