The pink Hubble photo reminds you every day that space is cool

Outer space is vast and dark. But beauty is ubiquitous, as Hubble constantly reminds us.

Take this recently shared image of NGC 972, a spiral galaxy discovered by German-British astronomer William Herschel in 1784. This is not our nearest neighbor, about 70 million light-years away. from a distance, but it takes a good picture.

The image has been broken by the Hubble Space Telescope and, as you may have already read in the tweet above, these orange-pink flourishes dotted on the image are the product of the 39, hydrogen, an essential element of star formation, reacting to the light emitted by newborn stars. The darker black spots mixed with the brightest pieces are cosmic dust.

NASA shares photos like this all the time, and they never get old. Hubble is a frequent source of stellar images, but remember: it was launched in 1990 and is almost 30 years old now. It has been maintained and upgraded over time, but it is still an older technology.

While Hubble is expected to stay and continue to send images to Earth for another 10 to 20 years, his successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is expected to be launched in early 2021 and bring a series of improvements to his core mission of peering. in the deep space.