Most Detailed Picture Yet Of A STAR NURSEY BIRTHING Suns. Cosmic Awe

God bless the Hubble. For years it has been bringing us glorious snapshots of the glorious beyond. Stimulating the imagination while showing us what lies beyond the Big Blue Marble. This picture is no different. It is a look at  30 Doradus, which is “the brightest and most prolific star-forming region in our galactic neighborhood”. Hell yeah!

io9:

According to  the ESA, the photograph “comprises one of the largest mosaics ever assembled from Hubble photos,” combining observations made by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera with those of the ESO’s MPG/ESO 2.2 meter telescope, which visualizes clouds of interstellar hydrogen and oxygen. Those observations produce the image seen below. The photo up top takes that image and adds data from  the Chandra observatory, which reveals x-ray (blue), infrared (red), and optical (green) wavelengths. According to the ESA:

[The image] reveals the stages of star birth, from embryonic stars a few thousand years old still wrapped in dark cocoons of dust and gas to behemoths that die young in supernova explosions. 30 Doradus is a star-forming factory, churning out stars at a furious pace over millions of years. The Hubble image shows star clusters of various ages, from about 2 million to about 25 million years old.

Not that I think our fat sapien meat-computers can truly grasp what lies out in space, it is always glorious to behold looks into it. I mean, pictures like this are just fucking insane.