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To celebrate the 29th anniversary of the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have captured this colorful and festive look on the sprawling southern crab nebula.
The nebula, officially known as Hen 2-104, is located several thousand light-years from Earth in the Centaurus constellation of the southern hemisphere. It seems to have two hourglass-shaped nested structures that have been carved by a pair of whirling stars in a binary system. The duo consists of an aging red giant star and an exhausted star, a white dwarf. The red giant loses its outer layers. Part of this ejected material is attracted by the gravity of the white pet dwarf.
The result is that the two stars are embedded in a flat disk of gas. This strip of material limits the flow of gas, so that it only moves away quickly above and below the disk. The result is an hourglass nebula.
The bubbles of gas and dust seem the brightest on the edges, giving the illusion of crab legs structures. These "legs" are probably the places where the outgoing flow is spreading in the surrounding interstellar gases and dust, or perhaps in materials that had previously been lost by the giant red star.
The output may last only a few thousand years, a tiny fraction of the system's life. This means that the outer structure can be thousands of years old, but that the inner hourglass must be a recent exit event. The red giant will eventually collapse to become a white dwarf. After that, the pair of surviving white dwarves will illuminate a gas shell called a planetary nebula.
The object was first reported in the late 1960s, but was supposed to be an ordinary star. In 1989, astronomers used the La Silla Observatory of the European Southern Observatory in Chile to photograph a roughly crab-shaped elongated nebula of symmetrical bubbles.
These early observations only showed the outer hourglass emanating from a bright central region. Hubble photographed the southern crab in 1999 to reveal intricate nested structures. These latest images were taken in March 2019 with a large set of color filters on Hubble's newest and most powerful detector, Wide Field Camera 3. This image is a composite of observations taken in various light colors. which correspond to the incandescent gases of the nebula. Red is sulfur, green is hydrogen, orange is nitrogen and blue is oxygen.
Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery. Since roosting above the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere, Hubble observes the universe under a near ultraviolet light, visible and close to the infrared. Over the past 29 years, the groundbreaking discoveries of the Space Telescope have revolutionized almost every area of astronomy and astrophysics. Among Hubble's landmark achievements, the most profound views ever taken of the evolving universe, from looking for disks forming a planet around nearby stars, to chemically probing the atmospheres of orbiting planets from other stars, to identify the first supermassive black hole in the heart of a nearby galaxy, and providing evidence of a universe in acceleration, perhaps powered by a source of energy. unknown energy in the fabric of space.
Hubble Trivia
Launched on April 24, 1990, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made more than 1.4 million observations of nearly 45,000 celestial objects.
In 29 years of existence, the telescope has made more than 169,000 trips on our planet, totaling more than 4.2 billion kilometers.
Hubble's observations yielded over 153 terabytes of data, which are available for current and future generations of researchers.
Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 16,000 scientific articles.
The Hubble Space Telescope is an international cooperation project between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, operates the telescope. The Institute of Space Telescope Sciences (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble's scientific activities. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
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