2023-04-21 15:07:37
Some celebrate birthdays with a cake. Others, with a photo. This is the case of researchers from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) who share a splendid new image with us on the occasion of the 33rd anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope.
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The Hubble Space Telescope has been giving us beautiful images of the Universe for no less than 33 years. About 1.6 million observations on nearly 52,000 different objects. And to celebrate this new anniversary, NASA and ESA, the European Space Agency, are today unveiling yet another new photo. That of the nebula NGC 1333, located in the molecular cloud of Perseus, some 960 light years from our Earth.
The image once again demonstrates the Hubble Space Telescope’s unique ability to explore the spectrum of light from ultraviolet to near infrared. On the edges of a giant cloud of cold molecular hydrogen, it reveals an effervescent cauldron of glowing gases and black dust stirred and blown by several hundred newly formed stars. And it highlights the highly disordered side of the star formation process in our Universe.
Gas, dust and stars
Note that despite the sharpness of the image, in the end, the Hubble Space Telescope only gives us a small glimpse of what is playing out in this turbulent region of the Universe. Most newborn stars remain hidden behind clouds of fine dust. The black areas of the photo, moreover, do not correspond to empty spaces, but to areas filled with dust, from which stars sometimes pierce brighter than the others.
At the bottom of the image, a cloud of ionized hydrogen appears as a sort of glowing keyhole. Or the grand finale of a fireworks display. Because outside the field of the photo, there are other nascent stars. Stars surrounded by disks of gas and dust that could produce planetary systems. But also powerful magnetic fields that direct two parallel beams of hot gas deep into space. They draw patterns on the hydrogen cloud, like traces of laser light.
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