Simple facts
What it is: 3D map of where stars form in the Milky Way
Where it is: Up to 4000 light years away in the Milky Way star formation region
When shared: September 16, 2025
The cleaned twigs of Fuchsia form an airy background to millions of bright white pinpricks, new images made from Gaia Space Telescope data. The glorious image is a peer in the vivid space kindergarten of a newborn, previously hidden from sight.
In the collection of 44 million “normal” stars, Gaia captured the lie 87 O-type stars – the rare infantile stars are very large and hot. They emit bright UV rays, which exudes so much energy that the rays blow up electrons from the hydrogen atoms that hit them, and ionize them. This process creates a cloud of charged hydrogen gas around the star O, known as the HII region.
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Scientists can search for this patch of ionized gas and identify where starry nursery is located within the galaxy. You can also see how far O Stars impacts reach.
Astronomers already had good ideas about how these nursery schools would look while peering from the Earth, but how they saw them from other directions was a blind spot. Using Gaia Space Telescope’s 1 billion pixel camera, which was released on December 19, 2013 and remained in operation until January 15, 2024, scientists created 3D maps for these regions.
Now, anyone can clean the Milky Way and get a glimpse of these stellar nursery schools from a variety of perspectives, the European Space Agency (ESA) wrote in the description of the image. The map includes the gum nebula, the North American nebula and the California nebula. The ESA also released a video accompanying the image, showing a 3D tour of the newly mapped regions.
For sublime space images, see Space Photos in this week’s archives.
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