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NASA Releases Spectacular Photos to Celebrate Hubble’s 28th Anniversary in Space!
April 20, 2018
By
Lorah Snow
To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s twenty-eighth anniversary in space, NASA released spectacular photos taken by the space telescope earlier this year. The image of the Lagoon Nebula taken in visible light shows a blue star called Herschel 36 “blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust” according to a statement issued by NASA.
Photo credit: NASA, ESA, and STSci
The Lagoon Nebula resides in the Sagittarius constellation about 4000 light-years away from earth. Like many other nebulae, the Lagoon Nebula is a stellar nursery—a region where stars are born. This happens as gas, dust, and other materials continue to clump together becoming denser and denser until they are dense enough to form stars. The remaining material may form planets, asteroids, and so forth.
Hershel 36, at the heart of the nebula, is 32 times more massive than our sun and 200,000 times brighter. Its about one million years old and is expected to “live” for another five million years based on its mass. It’s young for a star, and therefore still very active.
While bursting out of its cocoon it has burst holes in the nebula, allowing astronomers an incredible view of the birth and destruction taking place inside this stellar nursery.
The photograph taken by Hubble in infrared light doesn’t show the formation of clouds and dust as well as the visible light picture, but it shows many more stars.
NASA also released a Lagoon Nebula Zoom and Flythrough video that zooms into the core of the nebula.
Video credit: NASA
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