Busy Nursery

New stars are being born at the edges of a giant cloud of gas and dust in this recent image from the Gemini South Telescope in Chile. The stellar nursery, known as N159, is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to the Milky Way, which is about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Hot gas from older stars is flowing outward, ramming into surrounding clouds of colder material. That compresses the surrounding clouds, causing them to collapse to form new stars. [Gemini Observatory/AURA]