Hubble’s Stunning 28th anniversary pictures

The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most successful scientific projects carried out by humans in the history. It was created as a collaborative project between NASA and ESA. Hubble was launched 28 years ago on April 24, 1990. From then, Hubble has widened our knowledge of astronomy. Using Hubble, we have been observing numerous space phenomenon including birth and death of stars, merging of galaxies and expansion of universe. Hubble helped us to see planets and moons in our solar system, nebulae, stellar nurseries and thousands of galaxies. It also used to map the dark matter and find the evidence of existence of black holes. 

(Hubble Telescope - Wikipedia picture)

To celebrate Hubble’s 28^th anniversary, NASA has released two pictures of Lagoon Nebula which is 4,000 light years away from us. Both the pictures, one in visible light and one in Infrared light, are stunning and beautiful. So far, Hubble has produced more than 1.5m observations. Some of them are iconic pictures such as Eagle Nebula’s ‘Pillars of Creation’, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, The Sombrero Galaxy, etc. The new pictures of the Lagoon Nebula are as iconic as previous iconic Hubble pictures. 

(Lagoon Nebula (visible light) - Picture Courtesy: NASA/ESA/STScl)

The Lagoon Nebula was first discovered by an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Battista Hodierna before 1654. It can be seen with binoculars. The colorful pictures released by NASA show cloudy gas, dust and bright stars. A bright star at the center of the picture is Herschel 36. This star is 32 times heavier and 200,000 times brighter than our Sun. Herschel 36 is very active and younger than our Sun. It is just 1m years old while our Sun is 5 billion years old. According to NASA, Herschel 36 will live 5 million more years. Our sun is calculated to live 5 billion more years. 

(Lagoon Nebula (Infrared light) - Picture Courtesy: NASA/ESA/STScl)

The picture covers 4 light-years across of the nebula. The young star is emitting ultraviolet radiation, stellar winds, gas and dust around it. The blue color dust moving away from the star is glowing oxygen gas and the reddish dust is glowing nitrogen. The dark purple dust is mixture of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. 

When interstellar travel is feasible, we, humans, may travel near to such a stellar nursery and see such a beautiful space phenomenon from near as possible. 

(If you are interested to know about the future spacecrafts for the interstellar travel, read our previous article here).