NGC 602, Small Magellanic Cloud, Hubble

NGC 602, The stars are destroying the pillars. More specifically, some of the newly formed stars in the image center are emitting light so energetic that is evaporating the gas and dust in the surrounding pillars. Simultaneously, the pillars themselves are still trying to form new stars. The whole setting is the star cluster NGC 602, taken by the Hubble telescope in 2004. NGC 602 is located near the perimeter of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a small satellite galaxy of our Milky Way galaxy. At the estimated distance of the SMC, the featured picture spans about 200 light-years. A tantalizing assortment of background galaxies are also visible — mostly around the edges — that are at least hundreds of millions of light-years beyond.

The local environment of this cluster is similar to the environment of the early Universe, with low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionised gas also suggest that star formation is taking place. Together with its associated nebula cloud N90, which contains clouds of ionized atomic hydrogen, this cluster provides a valuable opportunity to examine how stars can form under dramatically different conditions from those in the solar neighborhood. The colors in the image are in false color taken with three filters with the red coming from a 814nm filter, green from a 658nm filter, and blue from a 555nm filter. The image comes close to being true color as 814nm is in the deep red and 555nm is blue green.

This image was produced by Michael Adler from data on the MAST website. The NASA version of this image includes data from the Chandra X ray telescope and the Spitzer infrared telescope. https://esahubble.org/images/ngc602/The adjacent image in the collection is an overlay of the Hubble and JWST images.

If you are curious as to where in the Small Magellanic Cloud, NGC 602, lies you can go to the an image that shows all of the nebula and where the NGC 602 is located.It is further to the right(east) of where my image of the the SMC ends and is in what is called the wing of the SMC that is bridging to the Large Magellanic Cloud. https://secure.sky-map.org/?img_source=IMG_613:all&ra=1.491667&de=-73.56667&zoom=6&show_box=1&box_ra=1.491667&box_de=-73.56667&box_width=50&box_height=50