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The latest image released by the Hubble Space Telescope is truly just beyond pallor.
Only see to her. The essential daring. The absolute play of it.
You were there, minding your own worldly affairs, and then Hubble must have come to remind you that our Universe is breathtaking, breathtaking, incredibly beautiful.
What you are looking at is a nebula about 4,900 light years away in the constellation Gemini. It’s called AFGL 5180 and is part of a large complex of molecular clouds called Gem OB1.
These thick molecular clouds are the birthplace of stars, and AFLG 5180 is no exception. It is spectacularly lit from within by a very young hot star that violently disturbs the space around it as it grows, carving vast cavities in the gas cloud.
To make a baby star, you need to start with a dense clump in a cloud of cold molecular gas. If this tuft collapses under its own gravity, it will begin to form a star. When this protostar begins to spin, the matter in the cloud surrounding it forms a disc, curling into the growing star, inexorably drawn by its strengthening gravitational pull.
(ESA / Hubble and NASA; JC Tan; R. Fedriani; Judy Schmidt)
If you look closely, you can see two beams emanating from behind a crease in the cloud, to the top right and bottom left of the image. It’s one way we know the star is growing. As matter is attracted to the star, it begins to interact with the complex magnetic field, producing powerful jets of plasma that shoot along the axis of rotation.
These jets only last as long as material falls on the star, so once the star stops growing, the jets will die.
In fact, the jets are one of the mechanisms that keep the star from getting ridiculously large: they push matter close to the star, putting it out of the reach of gravitational pull. Stellar winds, once thermonuclear fusion ignites in the star’s core, also pushes back matter.
What remains of the disk, once the star is finished growing, will clump together to form planets, asteroids, and other objects in the planetary system.
We look at clouds like AFLG 5180 to learn more about these processes, but it can be a bit tricky. The dusty clouds are really thick, making it hard to see what’s going on inside.
This is where instruments like Hubble come in handy: In addition to visible light, the Wide Field 3 camera can see infrared, which penetrates the dust, revealing the sparkling treasure of young stars inside.
And, of course, these images allow you to take a moment of your day to contemplate, in wonder, how beautiful a Universe we live in is.
If you would like to download this image for use as a wallpaper, you can find it on the Hubble website.
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