Berlin, May 18 (EFE).– The European Southern Observatory on Wednesday released an impressive image of “stellar ornamentation,” a peculiar pink and blue optical effect detected in a nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy some 163,000 light years from Earth.

The ESO said in a communique that the detailed photo of the LHA 120-N55 nebula, known simply as “N55,” was taken with the ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Paranal Desert.

The image shows a large concentration of stars, including several dozen with an intense bluish color, floating in a pink sea, due to the hue of the blanket of gas that surrounds them and reflects the light of the stars.

Blue-white stars produce very strong light that causes hydrogen atoms in N55 to separate from their electrons, said the ESO in its statement, causing the gas to glow with a characteristic pink color.

Astronomers study these phenomena to learn about the conditions that give rise to new stars, and to do that, they observe the “signature” of the glowing hydrogen gas produced from the starbirth process.

N55 is a brilliant cloud of gas in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, and it is located within a “superbubble” of gas and dust that is created by the births of many stars.

These superbubbles, which often reach hundreds of light years in diameter, form when part of the gas and dust that originally enveloped the new stars is blown away by strong winds caused after the stars begin to shine, as well as by shockwaves caused by supernovae when they explode. EFE