In this Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope, we visit a turbulent cauldron of star formation to see what is brewing inside dense clumps of gas. This is a star-forming region named LHA 120-N 159, or simply N159, located 161 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way galaxy. This image spans about 230 light-years across.

N159 is what astronomers call a light-years: an area of space filled with ionised hydrogen gas. In stellar nurseries such as this one, giant molecular clouds of cold hydrogen gas collapse under gravity, forming new stars. Many of these stars are extremely massive and hot, and their powerful ultraviolet radiation ionises the gas around them. This makes H II regions markers of active star formation, and as the ionised gas radiates light this turns them into the kind of brilliant emission nebula that we see in this image.…