This Hubble Space Telescope image shows how young, energetic, massive stars illuminate and sculpt their birthplace with powerful winds and searing ultraviolet radiation.
The giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 163,000 light-years away. The image is nicknamed the “Cosmic Reef,” because it resembles an undersea world.
The sparkling centerpiece of NGC 2014 is a grouping of bright, hefty stars, each 10 to 20 times more massive than our Sun. The stars’ ultraviolet radiation heats the surrounding dense gas and unleash fierce winds of charged particles that blast away lower-density gas, forming the bubble-like structures seen on the right. The blue areas in NGC 2014 reveal the glow of oxygen, heated to nearly 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit by the blast of ultraviolet light. The cooler, red gas indicates the presence of hydrogen and nitrogen.
By contrast, the seemingly isolated blue nebula at lower left (NGC 2020) has been created by a solitary mammoth star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun. The blue gas was ejected by the star through a series of eruptive events during which it lost part of its outer envelope of material.
This image commemorates Hubble's 30th anniversary in orbit.
For more information about this image, visit: hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2020/news-2020-16
For Hubble anniversary podcasts, videos, interactives and more, visit: www.nasa.gov/content/hubbles-30th-anniversary
Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI
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In celebration of the 29th anniversary of the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers used Hubble to capture this festive, colorful look at the tentacled Southern Crab Nebula.
The nebula, officially known as Hen 2-104, is located several thousand light-years from Earth. It appears to have two nested hourglass-shaped structures that were sculpted by a whirling pair of stars in a binary system. The duo consists of an aging red giant star and a burned-out star, a white dwarf. The red giant is shedding its outer layers. Some of this ejected material is attracted by the gravity of the companion white dwarf.
The result is that both stars are embedded in a flat disk of gas stretching between them. This belt of material constricts the outflow of gas so that it only speeds away above and below the disk. The result is an hourglass-shaped nebula.
The bubbles of gas and dust appear brightest at the edges, giving the illusion of crab-leg structures. These "legs" are likely to be the places where the outflow slams into surrounding interstellar gas and dust, or possibly material which was earlier lost by the red giant star.
For more information, visit: hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2019/news-2019-15.html
Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI
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This colorful Hubble image gives us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction.
At the center of the photo, a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust.
This mayhem is all happening at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away and visible in binoculars simply as a smudge of light with a bright core.
The giant star, called Herschel 36, is bursting out of its natal cocoon of material, unleashing blistering radiation and torrential stellar winds (streams of subatomic particles) that push dust away in curtain-like sheets. This action resembles the Sun bursting through the clouds at the end of an afternoon thunderstorm that showers sheets of rainfall.
For more information visit:
hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2018/news-2018-21.html
Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI
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In celebration of the 27th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1990, astronomers used the legendary telescope to take a portrait of a stunning pair of spiral galaxies. This starry pair offers a glimpse of what our Milky Way Galaxy would look like to an outside observer.
The edge-on galaxy is called NGC 4302, and the tilted galaxy is NGC 4298. These galaxies look quite different because we see them angled at different positions on the sky. They are actually very similar in terms of their structure and contents.
Two colorful spiral galaxies share Hubble’s field of view in this striking double portrait. Both are approximately 55 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. The edge-on member of this duo is named NGC 4302. Dust in its disk is silhouetted against rich lanes of stars. Absorption by dust makes the galaxy appear darker and redder than its companion. A large blue patch toward the bottom of the galaxy appears to be a giant region of recent star formation.
The second member of the pair is galaxy NGC 4298. In NGC 4298, the telltale, pinwheel-like spiral structure is visible, but it’s not as prominent as in other spiral galaxies.
This image was released in April 2017 to mark Hubble’s 27th year in orbit.
For more information, visit: hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2017/news-2017-14.html
Hubble also took an infrared view of this pair, which shows considerably more stars: hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2017/14/4020-Image.html
Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Mutchler (STScI)
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The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of an enormous bubble being blown into space by a super-hot, massive star.
The Bubble Nebula, or NGC 7635, is 7 light-years across — about one-and-a-half times the distance from our Sun to its nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri.
The seething star forming this nebula is 45 times more massive than our Sun. Gas on the star gets so hot that it escapes away into space as a "stellar wind" moving at over 4 million miles per hour. This outflow sweeps up the cold, interstellar gas in front of it, forming the outer edge of the bubble much like a snowplow piles up snow in front of it as it moves forward.
As the surface of the bubble's shell expands outward, it slams into dense regions of cold gas on one side of the bubble. This asymmetry makes the star appear dramatically off-center from the bubble, with its location in the 10 o'clock position in the Hubble view.
Dense pillars of cool hydrogen gas laced with dust appear at the upper left of the picture, and more "fingers" can be seen nearly face-on, behind the translucent bubble.
This Hubble image of the Bubble Nebula was chosen to mark the 26th anniversary of the launch of Hubble into orbit on April 24, 1990.
For more information please visit:
hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2016/news-2016-13.html
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
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