A beautiful blue butterfly flutters towards a nest of warm dust and gas, above an intricate network of cool filaments in this image of the Vela C region by ESA’s Herschel space observatory.
Vela C is the most massive of the four parts of the Vela complex, a massive star nursery just 2300 light-years from the Sun. It is an ideal natural laboratory for us to study the birth of stars.

Herschel’s far-infrared detectors can spot regions where young high- and low-mass stars have heated dense clumps of gas and dust, where new generations of stars may be born.  Read more.....

About the Herschel satellite

The Herschel space telescope, built by the European Space Agency (ESA), the largest ever built for space, was launched on March 14, 2009. One of its main goals : the study of star formation regions in the infrared and sub-millimetre ranges. In partnership with CNES (Centre national d’études spatiales), the CEA-Irfu, the CEA-Liten, and the CEA-Inac largely participate to this program of the European Space Agency, in particular in the building of the PACS infrared camera, the cooling systems and the primary mirror of the telescope.