@space_telescopes

class="content__text" Do you see the darkness that travels between the starry regions, like a snake in tall grass? That’s actually the result of a molecular cloud, known as the Circinus molecular cloud, which has a mass around 250,000 times that of the Sun. Astronomers say it’s filled with young stars, and the gas and dust needed to form them. However, this image by the Hubble Space Telescope shows that the area is so dense that we couldn’t peer inside. A future study by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which can see the infrared light from the young stars in the region, however, would be able to see past the dust. #Hubble #stars #galaxies #space Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; R. Sahai (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Serge Meunier. ALT TEXT: A star-forming region. A dark, dusty nebula forms an undulating trail that covers the center the image and blocks most of the background stars. In areas where the dust is not as thick, the background stars are a tinted orange. In the foreground is a semi-circular arc of bright orange and white gas. At the bottom of the arc is a somewhat obscured, orange star. In the foreground, above the arc, is a white star with Hubble’s characteristic four diffraction spikes.

February 21, 2023