Inside a distant superbubble astronomers find hot gas, young stars

Here to remind us that the universe can be a breathtakingly gorgeous place is this lush new image of an emission nebula where hot young stars are super-heating a vast expanse of gas 163,000 light-years from Earth.

The blue and white dots in the picture are super-hot stars that are just a few million years old. (For comparison's sake, our sun is 4.5 billion years old). The pinkish colors are large patches of hydrogen gas that have been stripped of their electrons by the intense light of the young, white-blue stars.

The image was taken with the European Space Observatory's Very Large Telescope, which is actually a system of four telescopes perched on a mountaintop in the Chilean desert.

Richard Hook, public information officer of the ESO, said the image was taken in visible light and pretty closely represents what you might see if you were looking at this celestial situation for yourself. 

"The colors are roughly right, but more prominent than what you would see if you were really close to this object and looking at it with your eyes," he said. "The red is really red -- coming from glowing hydrogen. The stars are really bluish, and this color would be visible through a telescope."
 

This particular emission nebula, N55, is located in a nearby satellite galaxy of the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

Astronomers note that N55 is situated inside a superbubble, which is itself inside the LMC.

Superbubbles can be hundreds of light-years across and form when powerful stellar winds from new stars combine with shock waves from supernova explosions to blow away most of the gas and dust that once surrounded them. 

The stars in the image are too young to have been involved in the making of the superbubble, however. They represent another round of star birth inside the bubble. Astronomers say that sometime in the future, these hot stars may themselves go supernova, causing another bubble to form inside the superbubble.

The picture was taken as part of the ESO's Cosmic Gems program, an outreach initiative to take inspiring images of the universe and share them with the public. Hook said they are taken only when the telescopes can't execute science programs because of cloud cover, for example, but some observations are still possible.

"It is important both not to get in the way of science, but also to obtain stunning new images, which are much enjoyed by the public and can also be educational," he said.

I couldn't agree more. 

Do you love science? I do! Follow me @DeborahNetburn and "like" Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.

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Do you love science? I do! Follow me @DeborahNetburn and "like" Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.