Baby stars blowing gas bubbles in the vast N159 star-forming cloud

Baby stars blowing bubbles

Today’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week reveals a distant stellar nursery in sharp detail, showing newborn stars sculpting their surroundings in a vast cloud of gas and dust.

The N159 star-forming cloud

N159 is a gigantic cloud of cold hydrogen gas located about 160 000 light-years away in the constellation Dorado, within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It is one of the most massive star-forming complexes in the LMC and stretches roughly 150 light-years across, a span nearly 10 million times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

This image shows only a portion of the full N159 region, highlighting the intricate structures carved into the cloud by stellar activity. N159 lies just south of the famous Tarantula Nebula, another major site of star formation in the LMC.

Interior conditions and newborn stars

Inside the subzero depths of the cloud, gravity compresses the cold gas until young stars ignite and shine through the darkness. Many of these newly formed stars are hot and massive, pouring out intense ultraviolet radiation into their birth environment.

These massive stars cause nearby hydrogen gas to glow with a characteristic red light, a type of emission to which Hubble’s instruments are particularly sensitive. As the radiation and stellar winds interact with the surrounding material, they create ridges, filaments and other complex structures in the nebula.

Red glow and gas bubbles

In the image, some bright stars appear to be wrapped in veils of reddish gas, while others sit near the centers of distinct reddish bubbles that reveal the dark background of space. These bubbles trace the effects of stellar feedback, where young stars flood their surroundings with high-energy radiation and drive powerful stellar winds.

This feedback effectively “blows bubbles” in the gas cloud, clearing cavities and reshaping the material from which future generations of stars may form. The result is a dynamic scene in which gravity builds new stars while stellar feedback sculpts and erodes the very clouds that created them.

Previous Hubble views

Astronomers have studied N159 with Hubble before, including a 2016 observation that captured the full extent of the cloud and resolved fine structures within it. A notable feature in the broader N159 region is the Papillon Nebula, a compact, butterfly-shaped High-Excitation Blob linked to the early stages of massive star formation.

The new view incorporates an additional wavelength of light to better highlight the hot gas around newborn stars, adding further insight into the interplay between young stellar populations and their natal clouds. Together, these observations help researchers trace how massive stars both emerge from and transform their environments over time.

“This stormy scene shows a stellar nursery known as N159, an HII region over 150 light-years across.”

Author’s summary

Hubble’s new portrait of N159 in the Large Magellanic Cloud captures massive newborn stars blasting hot, red-glowing hydrogen and blowing bubble-like cavities into a vast, frigid stellar nursery.

European Space Agency — 2025-11-28