The N79 Star Cluster in Nearby LMC Galaxy | NASA Webb & Chandra

The N79 Star Cluster in Nearby LMC Galaxy | NASA Webb & Chandra

✨What you’re seeing is a 98-light-year-wide chunk of star factory. This new image of N79, a giant region of star formation located about 160,000 light-years from Earth, combines observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NASA/European Space Agency/Canadian Space Agency Webb Space Telescope.

This image features an H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. The N79 nebula is a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionized.

N79 is a massive star-forming complex spanning roughly 1,630 light-years in the generally unexplored southwest region of the LMC. N79 is typically regarded as a younger version of 30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula), another of Webb’s recent targets. Research suggests that N79 has a star formation efficiency exceeding that of 30 Doradus by a factor of two over the past 500,000 years. 

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Star-forming regions such as this are of interest to astronomers because their chemical composition is similar to that of the gigantic star-forming regions observed when the Universe was only a few billion years old and star formation was at its peak. Star-forming regions in our Milky Way galaxy are not producing stars at the same furious rate as N79, and have a different chemical composition. Webb is now providing astronomers the opportunity to compare and contrast observations of star formation in N79 with the telescope’s deep observations of distant galaxies in the early Universe.

Image Description: Shafts of golden light bursting out of a central glowing orb cut through misty clouds in shades of purples, pinks, yellows, and blues.

Image Credits:

X-ray, Chandra: NASA/CXC/Ohio State Univ/T. Webb et al.

Infrared, Webb: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Major

Release Date: July 23, 2025

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