This Nasa image released yesterday, taken in ultraviolet, visible and red light by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, spans about 100 light-years. This massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known. Several of them are 100 times more massive than our sun. These hefty stars are destined to pop off, like a string of firecrackers, as supernovas in a few million years. These observations were taken from October 20 to 27, 2009. The blue colour is light from the hottest, most massive stars; the green from the glow of oxygen, and the red from fluorescing hydrogen.
