* Astronomy

Young Stars Take a Turn in the Spotlight



ESO's New Technology Telescope (NTT) has captured a striking image of the open cluster NGC 2100. This brilliant star cluster is around 15 million years old, and located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The cluster is surrounded by glowing gas from the nearby Tarantula Nebula.
Observers often overlook NGC 2100 because of its close proximity to the impressive Tarantula Nebula and the super star cluster RMC 136. The glowing gas of the Tarantula Nebula even tries to steal the limelight in this image - the bright colours here are the nebula's outskirts. This new picture was created from exposures through several different colour filters using the EMMI instrument on the New Technology Telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. The stars are shown in their natural colours, while light from glowing ionised hydrogen (shown here in red) and oxygen (shown in blue) is overlaid.

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