Stars Carve Out a Cavity Hundreds of Light-Years Wide in a Nebula (2 Photos)
A dark oval gapes amidst the glowing clouds of N44. Spanning roughly 210 by 140 light-years, this cavernous cavity lies within the Large Magellanic Cloud—a neighboring galaxy located about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Hubble reveals both the central void and the dense shell surrounding it. 
N44. ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Gouliermis. CC BY 4.0.
Stellar winds from massive stars and supernova explosions pushed gas outward from the central region. The gas swept up along the edges became a nursery for new stars. In their survey of N44, astronomers cataloged nearly half a million stars, with roughly 30,000 yet to begin fusing hydrogen into helium in their cores.
Near the upper right of the wide-field view lies a smaller bubble, N44F, shown in greater detail in a separate photo from 2004. Here, surrounding gas is sculptured by the wind of a single hot, massive star. Inside, elongated pillars of gas and dust shaped by its intense radiation are clearly visible. 
N44F, 2004 image. ESA/NASA, Yäel Nazé (University of Liège, Belgium) and You-Hua Chu (University of Illinois, Urbana, USA). CC BY 4.0.
The wide-field overview was released by ESA/Hubble in September 2026. The second photo is an earlier observation of a different region within the same complex, rather than a zoomed-in crop of the main frame.
Images courtesy of ESA/Hubble and ESA/NASA under the CC BY 4.0 license. The standalone photo of N44F originates from a 2004 ESA/Hubble release.
