Looking like a colorful holiday card, this image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals a vibrant green and red nebula far from Earth, where nature seems to have put on the traditional colors of the season. These colors, produced by the light emitted by oxygen and hydrogen, help astronomers investigate the star-forming processes in nebulas such as NGC 2080.

NGC 2080, nicknamed "The Ghost Head Nebula," is one of a chain ofstar-forming regions lying south of the 30 Doradus nebula in the LargeMagellanic Cloud that have attracted special attention. These regionshave been studied in detail with Hubble and have long been identified asunique star-forming sites. 30 Doradus is the largest star-formingcomplex in the whole local group of galaxies.

The light from the nebula captured in this image is emitted by twoelements, hydrogen and oxygen. The red and the blue light are fromregions of hydrogen gas heated by nearby stars. The green light on theleft comes from glowing oxygen. The energy to illuminate the green lightis supplied by a powerful stellar wind (a stream of high-speed particles)coming from a massive star just outside the image. The white region inthe center is a combination of all three emissions and indicates a coreof hot, massive stars in this star-formation region. The intenseemission from these stars has carved a bowl-shaped cavity in thesurrounding gas.

In the white region, the two bright areas (the "eyes of the ghost") -named A1 (left) and A2 (right) - are very hot, glowing "blobs" ofhydrogen and oxygen. The bubble in A1 is produced by the hot, intenseradiation and powerful stellar wind from a single massive star. A2 has amore complex appearance due to the presence of more dust, and itcontains several hidden, massive stars. The massive stars in A1 and A2must have formed within the last 10,000 years, since their natal gasshrouds are not yet disrupted by the powerful radiation of the newlyborn stars.

The research team noted that Hubble's superb resolution is essential tosee the various features in the nebula and to better understand theformation of massive stars in this interesting region.

This "enhanced color" picture is composed of three narrow-band-filterimages obtained March 28, 2000, with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera2. The colors are red (ionized hydrogen, H-alpha, 1040 seconds), green(ionized oxygen, 1200 seconds) and blue (ionized hydrogen, H-beta, 1040seconds). The image spans 67 x 67 arc-seconds, corresponding to 55 x 55light-years at the distance of the Large Magellanic Cloud (168,000light-years).

Credit: NASA, ESA & Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri (Observatoire de Paris,France).