Stellar Nurseries RCW120 - Happy Birthday Card

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A breathtaking greetings card showing a colour composite image of RCW120. It reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps where new stars are then formed. The 870-micron submillimetre-wavelength data were taken with the LABOCA camera on the 12-m Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope. Here, the submillimetre emission is shown as the blue clouds surrounding the reddish glow of the ionised gas (shown with data from the SuperCosmos H-alpha survey). The image also contains data from the Second Generation Digitised Sky Survey (I-band shown in blue, R-band shown in red). Image code: gstlnrsr ESO/J. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.