* Image acquisition by:
Irving Pieters.
* Processing: Ruben Barbosa.
Not far from us, about 3,000 light-years away in the direction of the northern constellation of Cepheus, hot and young stars carve beautiful pillars of gas and dust in a molecular cloud over 40 light-years in length called NGC 7822 (also known as Sharpless 171, SH 2-171).
Inside we can see bright edges and dark shapes, which stand out in the color image due to the use filters.
The image includes data from narrow band filters, mapping the emission of sulfur (SII), hydrogen alpha (Ha) and double ionized oxygen (OIII) in red, green and blue (RGB) tones, whose color combination has become known as the Hubble palette.
The darker pillars function as stellar maternities, where new stars are being formed; however, the mighty winds of newly formed hot stars erode the gas, destroying the reservoirs needed to create new stars.
This young complex of stars, Berkeley 59, whose stars are only a few million years old, contains one of the hottest stars discovered in our neighborhood, with a surface temperature of 45,000 K (10 times greater than that of the Sun) and superior luminosity in 100,000 times.
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