The image of the week shared by researchers working with the Hubble Space Telescope is stunning and shows a cluster of stars. A small part of the Lagoon Nebula is made up of a group of thousands of stars.
The smoke-like shapes of the cluster are formed from a cloud of dust and gas which is feeding the formation of new stars.
The Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 were used to investigate this scene. The region was searched for new examples of proplyds, a class of illuminated discs around newborn stars. The majority of proplyds have been found in a single area. Understanding their origin and lifetimes is difficult.
The data from the Advanced Camera for Surveys is combined with the data from the OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope to create this picture.
In celebration of the telescope's 28th anniversary, Hubble shared a famous photo of the Lagoon Nebula. The full nebula is 55 light years wide and 20 light years tall.
The Lagoon Nebula was named after it's wide dust lane, which looked like a lagoon in deep field images. There are more details in the dust structures which are blown about and sculpted by the stellar winds in and among the dust.
There is a recommended video.
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