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Since its launch on April 24, 1990, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made more than 1.4 million observations on nearly 45,000 celestial objects. For its 29th anniversary, NASA has chosen only one.
The Southern Crab Nebula is a monster from the southern sky, thousands of light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Centaurus.
Its hourglass shape is the product of an aging red star and a dying white star at the end of life, rushing side by side in a dance to death.
"The stellar duo, consisting of a red giant and a white dwarf, is too close to be viewed individually in this view," reads in a tribute to NASA.
"But the consequences of their whirlwind around the other are two vast shells of gas that extend into space like a fugitive balloon."
(NASA, ESA and STScI)
Although the structure is probably less than ten thousand years old, the crab is probably out of breath. As a crustacean moulting, the red star is also losing its exterior; Soon, it will also collapse, leaving a pair of white dwarf stars that will light up a gas shell called planetary nebula.
The rich colors, captured in the above image using Hubble's newest and most powerful detector, "Wide Field Camera 3", reflect glowing streaks of hydrogen, sulfur, nitrogen and oxygen.
Inserted into a flat disk of gas extending between them, these bubbles of gas and dust are pushed above and below the stars, creating an hourglass-shaped nebula and long, thin tendrils resembling crab legs.
(NASA / ESA)
The anniversary shot is a beautiful tribute to the power of persistence. When this celestial object was first written in 1967, astronomers assumed that it was an ordinary star.
It was only when Hubble watched the Southern Crab in 1999 that we could understand it for what it really is: a stormy duo. Twenty years later, Hubble turned to the same place, if only to remember everything we learned.
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