A new picture from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a beautiful ‘star-making factory’ deep in the universe this week.
The image focuses in on a piece of space 160,000 light years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
That means it takes light 160,000 years to travel the distance to this ‘star factor’, so this is actually what it looked like 160,000 years ago.
Here on Earth, Neanderthals were extinct only 40,000 years ago, so would still be roaming our planet for another 120,000 years after this light was emitted from the factory.
This is an unfathomably gigantic scale the telescope has revealed, with the full width of this factory being 150 light years across too.
Thick clouds of cold hydrogen – star fuel – twist over the giant area, glowing deep red where baby stars are forming, burning.
Some erratic stars have blasted their surroundings with powerful stellar winds which carve out giant bubbles in the gas.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is a nearby dwarf irregular galaxy which is a satellite of our Milky Way, slowly orbiting our galaxy. The Milky Way itself is 100,000 light years across.
It is visible in the southern hemisphere of Earth in the constellations of Dorado and Mensa, showing as a large misty cloud, easily seen by the naked eye in dark skies.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been in a low Earth orbit for the past three decades and has been revealing far away pieces of space for all that time. It is a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
This new picture from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a ‘star factory’ at work in the Large Magellanic Cloud
