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Young Stars Sculpt Gas with Powerful Outflows


NGC 346

This is a Hubble Space Telescope view of one of the most dynamic and intricately detailed star-forming regions in space, located 210,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. At the center of the region is a brilliant star cluster called NGC 346.

A torrent of radiation from the cluster's hot stars eats into denser areas creating a fantasy sculpture of dust and gas. The dark, intricately beaded edge of the ridge, seen in silhouette, contains several small dust globules that point back towards the central cluster, like windsocks caught in a gale.

The NGC 346 cluster, at the center of this Hubble image, is resolved into at least three sub-clusters and collectively contains dozens of hot, blue, high-mass stars, more than half of the known high-mass stars in the entire SMC galaxy. A myriad of smaller, compact clusters is also visible throughout the region.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Nota (STScI/ESA)

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