Tour Stunning Hubble Images of Incredible Nebulae in This New NASA Video
By NASA
Over the years,
the Hubble Space Telescope has taken hundreds of images of
different kinds of incredible nebulae in our universe.
A nebula is a giant
cloud of dust and gas in space. There are different types of nebulae, ranging
from sites where stars are being born under gravitational pressures to
expanding gaseous remnants thrown off by dying stars.
Hubble Senior Project
Scientist, Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, takes us on a tour of some of our universe’s
most incredible Nebulae.
Video Transcript:
Over the years, the
Hubble Space Telescope has taken hundreds of images of different kinds of
incredible nebulae in our universe.
A nebula is a giant
cloud of dust and gas in space. There are different types of nebulae, ranging
from sites where stars are being born under gravitational pressures to expanding
gaseous remnants thrown off by dying stars.
The famous Orion nebula
is a star-forming region only 1,500 light-years away, making it the closest
large star-forming region to Earth. Because it is so bright and prominent,
located just below Orion’s belt, this nebula is one we can see with the unaided
eye. It also offers an excellent peek at stellar birth for those with
telescopes.
This nebula is an
enormous cloud of dust and gas where vast numbers of new stars are forged. Its
bright, central region is the home of four massive, young stars that shape the
nebula.
These four hefty stars
are called the Trapezium because they are arranged in a trapezoidal pattern.
Ultraviolet light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula
and disrupting the growth of hundreds of smaller stars.
This stunning Hubble
image offers the sharpest view of the Orion Nebula ever obtained. Created using
520 different Hubble exposures taken in multiple wavelengths of light, this
mosaic contains over one billion pixels. The image’s orange color represents
hydrogen, green is oxygen, and red represents both sulfur and observations made
in infrared light.
While the Orion Nebula
is in the midst of creating new stars, other nebulae result from aging and
dying stars.
This image of the Cat’s
Eye Nebula shows a bull’s eye pattern of eleven or even more concentric rings.
Each ‘ring’ is actually the edge of a spherical bubble seen projected onto the
sky – that’s why it appears bright along its outer edge.
Observations suggest
Cat’s Eye was created when a medium-sized star ejected its mass in a series of
pulses at 1,500-year intervals. These convulsions created dust shells that form
a layered, concentric structure around the dying star.
The view from Hubble is
like seeing an onion cut in half, where each skin layer appears as a ring. Each
shell contains as much mass as all of the planets in our solar system combined.
Then, there are the
supernova remnants, like the Crab Nebula. These nebulae are made of debris from
exploded stars.
In the year 1054 AD,
Chinese astronomers recorded a “guest star” that was visible even in the
daytime sky for nearly a month. The “guest star” they observed was actually the
supernova explosion that created the Crab Nebula.
Today the Crab Nebula is
still visible as a six-light-year-wide remnant of that violent event.
This large mosaic of the
Crab Nebula was assembled from 24 individual exposures captured by Hubble over
three months. The orange filaments are the tattered remains of the star and
consist mostly of hydrogen. Green is sulfur, and red indicates doubly ionized
oxygen.
These elements were
expelled during the supernova explosion. The leftover, ultra-dense core of the
exploded star remains as a rapidly spinning neutron star in the
center of the Crab Nebula. Electrons whirling at nearly the speed of light
around the star’s magnetic field lines produce the eerie blue light in the
interior of the nebula.
The neutron star, like a
lighthouse, ejects twin beams of radiation that make it appear to pulse 30
times per second as it rotates.
Nebulae are some of the
most beautiful objects in our universe. Their incredible shapes and colors will
always inspire humanity to keep looking up at the stars. And with instruments
like the Hubble Space Telescope, we will continue to be able to uncover the
many mysteries of the universe.
