Hubble's vibrant image, highlighting its unparalleled ability to capture light ranging from ultraviolet to near-infrared, reveals a bubbling cauldron of luminous gases and inky-black dust, agitated and dispersed by hundreds of nascent stars hidden within the dark cloud. Although Hubble provides a glimpse into this celestial phenomenon, much of the star-forming frenzy remains concealed behind dense dust clouds, especially towards the bottom of the image. The dark areas, however, are not empty space; they are filled with obscuring dust.
To obtain this captivating image, Hubble peered through a dusty veil on the edge of a massive cold molecular hydrogen cloud – the building blocks for creating new stars and planets under the relentless force of gravity. The photograph emphasizes that star formation is a chaotic process in a tumultuous universe.
Violent stellar winds, likely originating from the bright blue star at the top of the image, surge through a curtain of dust. The fine dust particles scatter the starlight at blue wavelengths. Further down, another brilliant, super-hot star penetrates through filaments of obscuring dust, resembling the sun shining through dispersed clouds. A diagonal line of fainter companion stars appears reddish as the dust filters their light, allowing more red light to pass through.
The image's bottom showcases a keyhole glimpse into the dark nebula's depths. Hubble captures the reddish radiance of ionized hydrogen, reminiscent of a firework display's grand finale with multiple overlapping events. Pencil-thin jets, ejected from newly forming stars beyond the frame, create this spectacle. These stars are encircled by circumstellar discs, which may eventually give rise to planetary systems, and powerful magnetic fields that direct two parallel beams of hot gas deep into space – akin to science-fiction's double lightsabers. These jets carve patterns on the hydrogen cocoon, resembling laser light show tracings and serve as a star's birth announcement.
This snapshot offers a glimpse into the era when our sun and planets were formed within a dusty molecular cloud 4.6 billion years ago. Our sun's birth was not an isolated event but occurred amidst a frenzied stellar nursery, potentially even more massive and energetic than NGC 1333.
Launched into Earth's orbit on 25 April 1990 by NASA astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, the legendary Hubble Space Telescope has taken roughly 1.6 million observations of nearly 52,000 celestial objects. This wealth of knowledge about the universe is stored for public access in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and the European Hubble Space Telescope (eHST) Science Archive, hosted at ESA's European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Madrid.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI
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