Tapestry of Blazing Starbirth: Cosmic Reef (NGC 2014 & NGC 2020)

In this Hubble image, the giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 163,000 light-years away. The sparkling centerpiece of NGC 2014 is a group of bright, hefty stars, each 10-20x more massive than our Sun. Their UV radiation heats the surrounding gas. The stars also unleash fierce winds of charged particles, blasting away lower-density gas, forming the bubble-like structures on the right. The powerful stellar winds also push gas and dust to the nebula's denser left side, where it's piling up. Blue areas in NGC 2014 reveal the glow of oxygen, heated to nearly 20,000°F (11093°C). The cooler, red gas indicates the presence of hydrogen and nitrogen. By contrast, the seemingly isolated blue nebula at lower left (NGC 2020) has been created by a solitary mammoth star 200,000x brighter than our Sun. The blue gas was ejected by the star through a series of eruptive events during which it lost part of its outer envelope of material.