Stellar nursery bursts with newborn stars in hauntingly beautiful Hubble telescope image --

Space photo of the week

By Jamie Carter published yesterday

A new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows the Lupus 3 cloud in Scorpius bursting with young stars that are forming within collapsing clouds of gas and dust.



This landscape of gas and dust is busy birthing new stars. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, and K. Stapelfeldt (Jet Propulsion Laboratory); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))


A tranquil-looking cloud of gas and dust might not sound like much to get excited about, but it's home to one of the most fundamental phenomena in astronomy: star formation.

This is the star-forming region Lupus 3, a nebula where bright, hot stars are being born from a dense molecular cloud. Our own star, the sun, likely formed in a region just like this one more than 4 billion years ago.

Look carefully at this hauntingly beautiful image of Lupus 3 captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Serene yet full of energy, bluish fingers of gas and dust curl toward a dark dust cloud in the lower-left corner. Those fingers are where young stars of a particular type are born, but they can be spotted throughout the image, chiefly at the center left, bottom right and upper center. Called T Tauri stars, they're young — less than 10 million years old, so newborns in a cosmic sense — and show dramatic variations in brightness as they grow and evolve.

https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/stellar-nursery-bursts-with-newborn-stars-in-hauntingly-beautiful-hubble-telescope-image-space-photo-of-the-week