Hubble Captures Image of ‘Blooming’ Nebula

Like a blooming rose, a nearby nebula glows pink and white in an image released by scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope. The nebula N11A looks flowerlike because of the glow from radiation of massive stars at its heart, the European Space Agency said in a statement. Visible in true color at hubble.esa.int, N11A lies in a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small companion galaxy to the Milky Way galaxy, which contains Earth.

This Hubble image, made on May 17, 2000, allows scientists to identify the stars that make the nebula glow, which could help astronomers learn more about the formation of massive stars, those more than 10 times as massive as the sun. N11A is about 8 light-years across and 168,000 light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles.