Hubble’s view of a nearby stellar nursery in the Large Magellanic Cloud
A new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, published on 29 December 2025 as the European Space Agency’s “Picture of the Week”, offers a detailed look at part of the vast star-forming region N159 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This is a nearby dwarf galaxy about 160 000 light-years away, visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere as a faint smudge in the night sky. In this relatively close yet extremely dynamic neighbourhood, Hubble records a complex web of gas and dust clouds in which a new generation of stars is now being born.
The scene shown was captured in a so-called parallel field, imaged simultaneously with the recently released main Hubble image of the same complex. While the telescope’s primary camera is pointed at one target, other cameras observe adjacent regions of the sky at the same time. Thanks to this technique, astronomers gain additional, valuable views of the same cosmic neighbourhood without extra observing cost. In this case, the parallel field reveals a neighbouring section of the N159 stellar “factory”, allowing researchers to better assess how the star-formation process changes from region to region.
A giant hydrogen cloud: a network of ridges, cavities and glowing filaments
The image is dominated by dense clumps of cold hydrogen, the basic “raw material” for making stars. The gas is arranged in a complex network of ridges, cavities and elongated filaments stretching for tens of light-years. In the densest parts, where gravity is most effective, the clouds collapse and form protostars — clusters of newly born objects that are only just beginning to shine at full strength.
Hubble captured these structures using a combination of observations in the visible and near-infrared parts of the spectrum with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Special filters highlight the glow of hydrogen and ionized oxygen, so the surrounding gas appears in rich shades of red and pink, while bluish and white points reveal individual stars of different ages and masses. Such multi-layer images allow astronomers to compare the distribution of gas and dust with the positions of stars, which is crucial for understanding the region’s evolution.
The brightest parts of the scene betray the presence of very massive, hot young stars. They emit intense ultraviolet radiation that turns the surrounding hydrogen into a bright, ionized nebula. At the same time, their stellar winds — streams of charged particles blasting off the star’s surface — literally blow away the nearby gas and carve out cavities and bubbles. It is precisely in the contrast between dark, dense clouds and these illuminated hollow bubbles that we best see how young stars dramatically reshape the environment in which they formed.
N159: one of the most massive stellar “factories” in a neighbouring galaxy
The N159 region is among the largest and most massive giant molecular clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The entire complex is estimated to span more than 150 light-years and is located on the south-western edge of the famous Tarantula Nebula (30 Doradus), one of the most powerful star-forming regions in the nearby Universe. Together they form a kind of “laboratory” in which astronomers can observe different stages of stellar life — from the first gravitational compression of gas, through dazzling massive stars, to their later explosive endings.
N159 has been known to scientists for decades. Back in the late 1990s, Hubble discovered the Papillon Nebula at the centre of this complex — a compact, butterfly-shaped cloud of ionized gas less than two light-years across, hiding one or more especially massive young stars. That object became a symbol of extremely early stages of star formation: while the surrounding gas is only beginning to disperse, the star’s radiation is already illuminating the dense material that until recently concealed its birth.
Today’s Hubble views of N159, including the parallel field shown in the new image, build on those earlier observations. Astronomers can now compare older WFPC2 images with new high-sensitivity WFC3 data to track how the cloud structure changes over decades. This makes N159 not just a frozen frame, but almost a time series in which we can see how stars gradually rework the surrounding gas.
The Large Magellanic Cloud: a laboratory for galaxy evolution
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a dwarf galaxy of irregular, but partly spiral structure, located roughly 160 000 to 163 000 light-years from Earth. It is about 30 000 light-years wide and contains tens of billions of stars. Together with the smaller Small Magellanic Cloud it forms a pair of Milky Way satellite galaxies, connected by a bridge of gas and surrounded by a shared hydrogen envelope. This proximity and relatively small size make the LMC an ideal testbed for studying how galaxies form and recycle stellar material.
Unlike the Milky Way, whose interior is difficult to study because of dust clouds and our own position within the disc, we view the Large Magellanic Cloud from the outside. Its star fields and nebulae are revealed as a mosaic of different zones: from old globular clusters, through quiet regions with low star-formation rates, to explosive regions such as the Tarantula and N159. Each reflects different conditions of gas density, metallicity and gravitational disturbances.
Recent research has suggested that the centre of the Large Magellanic Cloud likely hosts a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 600 000 Suns. This is indicated by the paths of a group of extremely fast, so-called hypervelocity stars, which appear to have been ejected from the LMC’s galactic core in a close encounter with that black hole. Such results support the assumption that almost every galaxy — even dwarf ones like the Large Magellanic Cloud — possesses a black hole at its centre.
In that broader context, regions like N159 help explain how active star formation and the influence of a supermassive black hole together shape the evolution of an entire galaxy. While massive stars in nebulae push out and heat gas with their winds and supernova explosions, the black hole’s gravity at the centre can redirect the flow of interstellar material on a global scale.
Stellar winds and “bubbles”: feedback in action
In the new Hubble image, a string of bubbles resembling hollow spheres bears witness to a process astronomers call feedback. When a massive star is born, it does not remain a passive observer: its energy and winds quickly “clean” the immediate surroundings. Gas that once fuelled the star’s birth is blown outward, compressed into the bubble walls and heated until it glows. At the centre of the bubble remains a young star, often revealed only once some of the surrounding material has been pushed aside.
Along the edges of these cavities, new contrasts arise: while gas in some places is thinned out and cools, in other locations compression can trigger the formation of additional stars. This creates a complex network of mutual influence in which one generation of stars sets the conditions for the next. In N159, many such bubbles are visible, suggesting this is a “factory” that has been operating for a long time in multiple waves, rather than a single isolated episode of star formation.
Dark, almost black clouds in the foreground obscure the light of stars behind them, but at the same time provide a clue to the distribution of dust. That dust, made of silicate and carbon grains, is crucial for cooling gas and forming molecules — and thus for the formation of planets. In the Hubble image, dark filaments act like shadows stretching across a glowing background canvas, channeling gas flow into narrow lanes that feed the growth of protostars.
Beyond optical data, astronomers study N159 and similar regions across other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum — from radio waves all the way to X-rays. Radio telescopes reveal cold clouds of molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide, while infrared instruments, such as those on the James Webb Space Telescope, can “peek” deeper into dusty cores where stars are still hidden in the earliest phase of formation. Hubble’s new image is therefore part of a broader puzzle in which each instrument contributes a different piece of information.
Why N159 matters for understanding star formation
Although N159 lies outside our galaxy, conditions in the Large Magellanic Cloud in many ways resemble earlier phases in the Universe’s history. That galaxy has a slightly lower fraction of heavier chemical elements (so-called lower metallicity) compared with the Milky Way. Since the first generations of stars formed in an even more chemically poor environment, observing N159 helps scientists infer what star formation looked like in the young Universe.
It is especially important that N159 gives birth to a large number of very massive stars. They live briefly — only a few million years — but through supernovae and powerful winds they expel heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen and iron into the surrounding space. Those elements later end up in new generations of stars and planetary systems. Every detailed look at regions like N159 is in fact a glimpse of how the Universe becomes chemically “enriched” and how the conditions needed for planets like Earth are created.
The new Hubble image in the parallel field allows astronomers to compare different parts of the same complex and notice nuances in gas distribution, bubble formation and the concentration of young stars. Some parts of N159 look as if they have already gone through several waves of cloud formation and destruction, while others are only entering a phase of intense star formation. Such differences provide data on how formation waves propagate through the entire cloud and how long an active “season” lasts in a single stellar factory.
For the wider public, Hubble images of N159 and similar regions may above all be visually spectacular — networks of red clouds, dark shadows and sparkling points of stars that resemble artistic abstractions. But for astronomy they are a key tool for reconstructing the life cycle of stars and the evolution of galaxies. Every new detail extracted from these images, from bubble shapes to the distribution of young stars, helps answer the fundamental question: how do stars form from cold clouds of gas — stars that, billions of years later, can host planets and, potentially, life.
Sources:
- ESA/Hubble – official release and description of the new image of the N159 region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (link)
- NASA – earlier Hubble observations of N159 and the Papillon Nebula, showing the cloud structure and the butterfly-shaped nebula within the N159 complex (link)
- Sci.News – analysis of the latest Hubble image of the star-forming cloud N159 and a description of visible structures in the nebula (link)
- Constellation Guide – general information about the Large Magellanic Cloud, its distance, size and stellar population in the neighbouring galaxy (link)
- NASA Science – overview of the properties of the Large Magellanic Cloud and its main star-forming regions, including the Tarantula Nebula and surrounding areas (link)
- Reuters – report on the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Large Magellanic Cloud based on observations of hypervelocity stars (link)
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