21 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –
NASA celebrates the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble telescope with an ethereal photo of a nearby star-forming region, NGC 1333, 960 light years away in the Perseus cloud.
Hubble was launched into orbit around Earth on April 25, 1990 by NASA astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. To date, the legendary telescope has made approximately 1.6 million observations of nearly 52,000 celestial targets, reports NASA.
Hubble’s colorful view of NGC 1333, shown through its unique ability to image from ultraviolet to near-infrared light, reveals a fizzing cauldron of glowing gases and black dust churned up and swept along by several hundred newly formed stars embedded within the dark cloud.
Hubble only scratches the surface because most of the star-giving firestorm is hidden behind clouds of fine dust, essentially soot, that thicken toward the bottom of the image. The blackness of the image is not an empty space, but full of dust that obscures.
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 relentless pull of gravity. The image underscores the fact that star formation it is a messy process in our bustling universe.
Fierce stellar winds, likely from the bright blue star at the top of the image, blow through a curtain of dust. The fine dust scatters starlight into blue wavelengths.
Lower down, another bright, super-hot star shines through filaments of obscuring dust, looking like the Sun shining through scattered clouds. A diagonal string of fainter companion stars appears reddish because dust is filtering the starlight, allowing more red light to pass through.
The bottom of the image features a keyhole look deep into the dark nebula. Hubble captures the reddish glow of ionized hydrogen. It looks like a fireworks ending, with several events overlapping. This is caused by pencil-thin jets shooting out of newly formed stars outside the frame of view. These stars are surrounded by circumstellar disks, which can eventually produce planetary systems, and powerful magnetic fields that direct two parallel beams of hot gas into deep space, like a double lightsaber from sci-fi movies. They carve patterns into the hydrogen cocoon, like traces from a laser light show. The jets are the announcement of the birth of a star.
This view offers an example of the time when our Sun and planets formed within such a dusty molecular cloud, 4.6 billion years ago.
