Picture of the Day - Glowing Stellar Nurseries

This image 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.

Colour composite image of RCW120. Credit: ESO

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 Digitized Sky Survey (I-band shown in blue, R-band shown in red).