Hubble celebrates its 33rd anniversary with a sneak peek at a nearby star-forming region

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Hubble celebrates its 33rd anniversary with a sneak peek at a nearby star-forming region

This image was taken in celebration of the 33rd anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1990. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI; Image processing: Varun Bajaj (STScI), Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Jennifer Mack (STScI)

Astronomers celebrate the 33rd anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope with an ethereal image of the nearby star-forming region, NGC 1333. Located in the Perseus molecular cloud, the nebula lies about 960 light-years away.

Hubble’s colorful view, displayed by its unique ability to acquire images from ultraviolet to near infrared, reveals a bubbling cauldron of glowing gas and black dust stirred and exploded by the several hundred newly formed stars embedded within. dark cloud. Hubble is only scratching the surface because most of the star-generated firestorm is hidden behind clouds of fine dust — soot mainly — that are thicker toward the bottom of the image. The blackness in the photo is not Empty spacebut full of opaque dust.

To capture this image, Hubble peered through a veil of dust at the edge of a giant cloud of cold molecular hydrogen — the raw material for making new stars and planets under the harsh influence of gravity. The photo confirms the fact that star formation It is a chaotic process in our troubled world.

A fierce stellar wind, most likely from the bright blue star at the top of the image, is blowing through a curtain of dust. Fine dust scatters starlight at blue wavelengths.

Farther afield, another extremely bright star is shining through strands of opaque dust, appearing like the rising sun through the scattering clouds. A diagonal series of faint companion stars appears reddish because the dust filters the starlight, letting more red light through.






Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The lower part of the image shows a keyhole peek deep into the dark nebula. Hubble captures the reddish glow of ionized hydrogen. It feels like a fireworks finale, with many overlapping events. This is caused by the thin jets of newly formed stars that shoot out of view. These stars are surrounded by stellar disks, which may eventually result planetary systems, and powerful magnetic fields that direct two parallel beams of hot gas into the depths of space, like a twin lightsaber from a science fiction movie. They carve patterns on the hydrogen cocoon, like traces of laser light. Airplanes are announcing the birth of a star.

This view provides an example of when our sun and planets formed inside such dust molecular cloud4.6 billion years ago. Our Sun didn’t form in isolation, but rather was embedded inside a hole full of frantic stellar birth, perhaps even more energetic and massive than NGC 1333.

Hubble was deployed into Earth orbit on April 25, 1990 by NASA astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery. To date, the legendary telescope has taken nearly 1.6 million views of nearly 52,000 celestial targets. This treasure trove of knowledge about the universe is stored for public access in the Mikulski Archives for Space Telescopes, at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

the quote: Hubble celebrates its 33rd anniversary with a peek into the nearby star-forming region (2023, April 20), Retrieved April 21, 2023 from https://phys.org/news/2023-04-hubble-celebrates-33rd-anniversary- peek. html

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