To mark its 30th anniversary the Hubble Space Telescope team have released a stunning new image captured by the satellite showing a vast star-forming region.
Named the ‘tapestry of blazing starbirth’, the new image brings together the nebula NGC 2014 and its neighbour NGC 2020 – both about 163,000 light years from Earth.
They are part of the Milky Way satellite galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud and the image ha been nicknamed the ‘Cosmic Reef’ as it looks like an undersea world.
Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990 on the Space Shuttle Discovery and has ‘revolutionised modern astronomy’, according to the European Space Agency.
This year it has marked 30 years of discovery with a portrait of two colourful nebulae showing how massive stars are able to sculpt their homes of gas and dust.
Although NGC 2014 and NGC 2020 appear to be separate in the visible-light image taken by Hubble, they are actually part of one giant star formation complex.
The star-forming regions are dominated by the glow of stars at least 10 times more massive than our Sun.
These stars have short lives of only a few million years, compared to the 10-billion-year lifetime of our Sun.
‘The sparkling centerpiece of NGC 2014 is a grouping of bright, hefty stars near the centre of the image that has blown away its cocoon of hydrogen gas (coloured red) and dust in which it was born,’ wrote ESA.
‘A torrent of ultraviolet radiation from the star cluster is illuminating the landscape around it.’