New image released on Hubble’s anniversary shows the energetic conditions under which star formation takes place.
A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a dusty region of space that’s home to bouts of chaotic star formation.
Newborn stars embedded within a dark cloud of cosmic dust are projecting stellar winds out into space, stirring and churning the material surrounding them.
The region is called NGC 1333 and is located 960 lightyears away.
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The image has been released to coincide with the Hubble Space Telescope’s 33rd anniversary.
Hubble was able to observe the region in various wavelengths, from ultraviolet to near-infrared, enabling it to peer through a veil of dust on the edge of a cosmic cloud of cold molecular hydrogen.
This is the raw material out of which new stars are born, as gravity causes cosmic material to clump together and coalesce over time.
Star-forming regions like these are something of a juxtaposition, as the newborn stars carve and scatter the materials out of which they were born the first place.
That’s likely the case with the large star at the top of the image, which is probably projecting streams of charge particles known as stellar winds.
This causes surrounding dust to be churned up, scattering the starlight at blue wavelengths.
Towards the bottom of the image, more stars are just about bright enough to illuminate sections of the very dense, cosmic dust that surround them, in wavelengths at which Hubble can observe.
At the very bottom of the image can be seen a small region glowing red through ionised hydrogen, caused by jets shooting out of the newly-formed stars.
It’s incredible to think that our Sun, planet Earth and indeed the entirety of our Solar System once began like this: a newly-formed star surrounded by a dusty disc out of which the planets would eventually grow.
The Hubble Space Telescope was deployed into Earth orbit onboard a NASA Space Shuttle on 25 April 1990.