In this image, the Hubble Space Telescope unveils some of nature's own fireworks - a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2. The cluster resides inside a vibrant stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina. The comparatively young, 2-million-year-old star cluster contains some of our galaxy's hottest, brightest, and most massive stars. The largest stars are unleashing a torrent of ultraviolet light and hurricane-force winds that etch away the enveloping hydrogen gas cloud. This creates a fantasy celestial landscape of pillars, ridges, and valleys.
NASA released this image in celebration of the 25th anniversary of Hubble's launch into space.
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Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team
Tags: Westerlund 2 Hubble Space Telescope Hubble NASA space astronomy Gum 29 star cluster Hubble Space Telescope 25th Anniversary 25th Anniversary Carina stellar nursery star formation emission nebula open cluster
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope revisited the famous Pillars of Creation, revealing a sharper and wider view of the structures in this visible-light image.
Astronomers combined several Hubble exposures to assemble the wider view. The towering pillars are about 5 light-years tall. The dark, finger-like feature at bottom right may be a smaller version of the giant pillars. The image was taken with Hubble's versatile and sharp-eyed Wide Field Camera 3.
The pillars are bathed in the blistering ultraviolet light from a grouping of young, massive stars located off the top of the image. Streamers of gas can be seen bleeding off the pillars as the intense radiation heats and evaporates it into space. Denser regions of the pillars are shadowing material beneath them from the powerful radiation. Stars are being born deep inside the pillars, which are made of cold hydrogen gas laced with dust. The pillars are part of a small region of the Eagle Nebula (also known as Messier 16), a vast star-forming region 6,500 light-years from Earth.
The colors in the image highlight emission from several chemical elements. Oxygen emission is blue, sulfur is orange, and hydrogen and nitrogen are green.
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Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Tags: Hubble Space Telescope Hubble NASA space astronomy Pillars of Creation Eagle Nebula Serpens July Sky night sky M16 Messier 16 NGC 6611 emission nebula
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago.
Called the Veil Nebula, the debris is one of the best-known supernova remnants, deriving its name from its delicate, draped filamentary structures. The entire nebula is 110 light-years across, covering six full moons on the sky as seen from Earth, and resides about 2,100 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.
This view is a mosaic of six Hubble pictures of a small area roughly two light-years across, covering only a tiny fraction of the nebula's vast structure.
This close-up look unveils wisps of gas, which are all that remain of what was once a star 20 times more massive than our Sun. The fast-moving blast wave from the ancient explosion is plowing into a wall of cool, denser interstellar gas, emitting light. The nebula lies along the edge of a large bubble of low-density gas that was blown into space by the dying star prior to its self-detonation.
The image shows an incredible array of structures and detail from the collision between the blast wave and the gas and dust that make up the cavity wall. The nebula resembles a crumpled bed sheet viewed from the side. The bright regions are where the shock wave is encountering relatively dense material or where the "bed sheet" ripples are viewed edge on.
In this image, red corresponds to the glow of hydrogen, green from sulfur, and blue from oxygen. The bluish features, outlining the cavity wall, appear smooth and arched in comparison to the fluffy green and red structures. The red glow is from cooler gas that was excited by the shock collision at an earlier time and has subsequently diffused into a more chaotic structure. A few thin, crisp-looking, red filaments arise after gas is swept into the shock wave at speeds of nearly 1 million miles an hour, so fast that it could travel from Earth to the moon in 15 minutes.
Astronomers are comparing these images to images taken by Hubble in 1997. This comparison allows scientists to study how the nebula has expanded since it was originally photographed. The supernova that created the Veil Nebula would have been briefly visible to our very distant ancestors about 8,000 years ago as a bright "new star" in the northern sky.
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Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration
Acknowledgment: J. Hester (Arizona State University)
Tags: Hubble Space Telescope Hubble NASA space astronomy Veil Nebula Carina supernova remnant NGC 6960
Jupiter's monster storm, the Great Red Spot, was once so large that three Earths would fit inside it. But measurements by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the largest storm in our solar system has downsized significantly. The red spot, which has been raging for at least a hundred years, is only the width of one Earth. What is happening? One possibility is that some unknown activity in the planet's atmosphere may be draining energy and weakening the storm, causing it to shrink.
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Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center)
Acknowledgment: C. Go, H. Hammel (Space Science Institute and AURA), and R. Beebe (New Mexico State University)
Science Credit: A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), G. Orton (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), J. Rogers (University of Cambridge, UK), and M. Wong and I. de Pater (University of California, Berkeley)
Tags: Hubble Space Telescope Hubble NASA space astronomy Jupiter planets Solar System planetary atmosphere planetary weather Great Red Spot GRS
On February 24, 2009, the Hubble Space Telescope took a photo of four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet. In this view, the giant orange moon Titan casts a large shadow onto Saturn's north polar hood. Below Titan, near the ring plane and to the left is the moon Mimas, casting a much smaller shadow onto Saturn's equatorial cloud tops. Farther to the left, and off Saturn's disk, are the bright moon Dione and the fainter moon Enceladus.
These rare moon transits only happen when the tilt of Saturn's ring plane is nearly "edge on" as seen from Earth. Saturn's rings were perfectly edge on to our line of sight on August 10, 2009, and September 4, 2009. This "ring plane crossing" occurs every 14-15 years. In 1995-96 Hubble witnessed the ring plane crossing event, as well as many moon transits, and even helped discover several new moons of Saturn.
The banded structure in Saturn's atmosphere is similar to Jupiter's.
Early 2009 was a favorable time for viewers with small telescopes to watch moon and shadow transits crossing the face of Saturn. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, crossed Saturn on four separate occasions: January 24, February 9, February 24, and March 12, although not all events were visible from all locations on Earth.
These pictures were taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on February 24, 2009, when Saturn was at a distance of roughly 775 million miles (1.25 billion kilometers) from Earth. Hubble can see details as small as 190 miles (300 km) across on Saturn. The dark band running across the face of the planet slightly above the rings is the shadow of the rings cast on the planet.
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Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: M.H. Wong (STScI/UC Berkeley) and C. Go (Philippines)
Tags: Hubble Space Telescope Hubble NASA space astronomy Saturn Solar System planet moons Titan Mimas Dione Enceladus transit quadruple transit