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Hubble Unveils a Glittering View of Sh2-284

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Hubble Unveils a Glittering View of Sh2-284

Against the dark background of space, pale, misty clouds of gas and dust are liberally sprinkled with blue and pink stars. Some bright pink patches of clustered stars are visible, as are dark brown knots of dust.
Hubble’s infrared view of emission nebula Sh2-284 provides a glimpse of the brilliant young stars hidden within clouds of gas and dust.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Andersen (European Southern Observatory – Germany); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

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A tiny fraction of the stellar nursery known as Sh2-284 is visible in this glittering, star-filled NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. This immense region of gas and dust is the birthing place of stars, which shine among the clouds. Bright clusters of newborn stars glow pink in infrared light, and clouds of gas and dust, resembling puffy cumulus clouds, are dotted with dark knots of denser dust.

This image shows an infrared view from Hubble, giving an excellent view of the stars that might otherwise be obscured by Sh2-284’s clouds. Unlike visible light, infrared wavelengths can travel through clouds of gas and dust, providing a glimpse of the stars forming within the obscuring clouds.

The nebula is shaped by a young central star cluster, Dolidze 25 (not visible in the Hubble image), whose stars range from 1.5 to 13 million years old (our Sun, in contrast, is 4.6 billion years old). The cluster blasts out ionizing winds and radiation, pushing at the gas and dust of the nebula and carving out intricate shapes and pillars, as seen in detail here. This ionizing radiation gives Sh2-284 its classification as an HII region, an emission nebula consisting primarily of ionized hydrogen. An emission nebula like Sh2-284 glows with its own light as stars within or nearby energize its gas with a flood of intense ultraviolet radiation.

Reddish-colored, ground-based image of Shw-284 (top) contains a box that shows the location of the smaller but more detailed Hubble image (bottom). The gas clouds are more prominent in the ground-based image.
The ground-based image (top) of M24 shows the location of the Hubble view (bottom). The European Southern Observatory’s visible-light image shows prominent clouds of gas and dust, while the Hubble image’s infrared vision highlights the stars within and behind the clouds.
Ground-based image: ESO/VPHAS+ Team; Hubble image: NASA, ESA, and M. Andersen (European Southern Observatory – Germany); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

Sh2-284 is also a low-metallicity region, which means it is poor in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. These conditions mimic the early universe, when matter was mostly helium and hydrogen and heavier elements were just beginning to form via nuclear fusion within massive stars. Hubble took these images as part of an effort to examine how low metallicity influences stellar formation and how this would apply to the early universe.

Sh2-284 resides 15,000 light-years away at the end of an outer spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy, in the constellation Monoceros.

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Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

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