File:Heart of the Lagoon Nebula (41562093111).jpg
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DescriptionHeart of the Lagoon Nebula (41562093111).jpg |
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. Herschel 36’s violent activity has blasted holes in the cloud, allowing astronomers to study this action-packed stellar breeding ground. The hefty star is 32 times more massive and 40,000 times hotter than our Sun. It is nearly nine times our Sun’s diameter. Herschel 36 is still very active because it is young by a star’s standards, only 1 million years old. Based on its mass, it will live for another 5 million years. In comparison, our smaller Sun is 5 billion years old and will live another 5 billion years. This region epitomizes a typical, raucous stellar nursery full of birth and destruction. The clouds may look majestic and peaceful, but they are in a constant state of flux from the star’s torrent of searing radiation and high-speed particles from stellar winds. As the monster star throws off its natal cocoon of material with its powerful energy, it is suppressing star formation around it. However, at the dark edges of this dynamic ecosystem, stars are forming within dense clouds of gas and dust. Dark, elephant-like “trunks” of material represent dense pieces of the cocoon that are resistant to erosion by the searing ultraviolet light and serve as incubators for fledgling stars. They are analogous to desert buttes that resist weather erosion. The Hubble view shows off the nebula’s structure. Dust pushed away from the star reveals the glowing oxygen gas (in blue) behind the blown-out cavity. Herschel 36’s brilliant light is illuminating the top of the cavity (in yellow). The reddish hue that dominates part of the region is glowing nitrogen. The dark purple areas represent a mixture of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The image shows a region of the nebula measuring about 4 light-years across. The observations were taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 between February 12 and February 18, 2018. For more information on Hubble’s observations of M8, see: <a href="hubblesite.org/image/4150/news_release/2018-21" rel="nofollow">hubblesite.org/image/4150/news_release/2018-21</a>. Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI |
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Source | Heart of the Lagoon Nebula |
Author | NASA Hubble Space Telescope |
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ESA/Hubble images, videos and web texts are released by the ESA under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license and may on a non-exclusive basis be reproduced without fee provided they are clearly and visibly credited. Detailed conditions are below; see the ESA copyright statement for full information. For images created by NASA or on the hubblesite.org website, or for ESA/Hubble images on the esahubble.org site before 2009, use the {{PD-Hubble}} tag.
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This image was originally posted to Flickr by NASA Hubble at https://flickr.com/photos/144614754@N02/41562093111 (archive). It was reviewed on 13 July 2018 by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0. |
13 July 2018
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JPEG file comment | For 28 years, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been delivering breathtaking views of the universe. Although the telescope has made more than 1.5 million observations of over 40,000 space objects, it is still uncovering stunning celestial gems.
The latest offering is this image of the Lagoon Nebula to celebrate the telescope’s anniversary. Hubble shows this vast stellar nursery in stunning unprecedented detail. 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 region epitomizes a typical, raucous stellar nursery full of birth and destruction. |
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