BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Hubble Space Telescope - 27th birthday Aptil 2017

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. N159 is a stellar nursery in the LMC. There are many hot young stars which emit strong ultraviolet light. That makes nearby hydrogen gas glow. The stars also have very strong stellar winds – you can see their handiwork in the ridges and arcs and filaments they carve out of the surrounding material. N159 is over 150 light years across and located around 160,000 light years away.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Wow, I am always blown away when I see pictures like this one and even more blown away when it is videos, this is so beyond amazing!

I love the glittering jewels of the Terzan 5 cluster. The cluster, say the astronomers, is most likely the relic of the very early days of the Milky Way.

To make the image, they used data from one of Hubble's cameras, plus that from two ground-based telescopes, an adaptive optics instrument on the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory, and also an infrared camera at the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. The infrared was needed to penetrate clouds of dust, and adaptive optics sharpen ground-based images by compensating for changes in our atmosphere.

Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble/F. Ferraro

Wow!

It's nebula IRAS 05437+2502 in the constellation Taurus. It was discovered in 1983 by IRAS - the Infrared Astronomical Satellite - which also found many other objects that were invisible from the ground.

It's certainly an interesting and dramatic shape, but astronomers are not certain what's caused it. It seems to be a small isolate star formation region.


Credit: ESA/Hubble, R. Sahai and NASA

Have a look at this stunning image of NGC 6210, a planetary nebula in the constellation Hercules.

A planetary nebula is created from shells of material ejected by a dying star. Our Sun will one day develop a planetary nebula, but that's billions of years into the future.

Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA

Here is NGC 278, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cassiopeia. It's some 38 million light years away.

The galaxy is currently undergoing an immense burst of star formation. This flurry of activity is shown by the unmistakable blue-hued knots speckling the galaxy’s spiral arms, each of which marks a clump of hot newborn stars.

However, NGC 278’s star formation is somewhat unusual; it does not extend to the galaxy’s outer edges, but is only taking place within an inner ring some 6500 light-years across. [While] the galaxy’s center is bright, its extremities are much darker. Such a ring of star formation is called a nuclear ring.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA and S. Smartt (Queen's University Belfast)

Makes one realize how tiny we are.

Feast your eyes on NGC 299, an open star cluster located in the Small Magellanic Cloud. It isn't actually a cloud, of course, but rather a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The stars look like gemstones.



Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

You can find out more about star clusters here.

Amazing!