The latest image released from the Hubble Space Telescope is just a little longer than the panel.
Exactly look at e. The turn audacity. The truth fog off.
Here you were, just watching your own supernatural business, and then Hubble had to come in and remind you that our Universe is silly, depressed, pretty beautiful.
What you are looking at is a nebula about 4,900 light-years away in the Gemini constellation. It is known as AFGL 5180, and is part of a large molecular cloud collection named Gem OB1.
Molecular clouds are so thick where stars are born, and AFLG 5180 is an exception. It is brilliantly lit from the inside by a hot, young star that disturbs the area around it as it grows, sculpting huge caves in the gas cloud.
To make a baby star, you have to start with a dense lump in a cloud of cool molecular gas. If this lump falls below its own depth, it will start a star. As that protostar begins to spin, the material in the surrounding cloud forms a disc, sputtering into the growing star, inexorably drawn in by it. strengthening traction.
(ESA / Hubble & NASA; JC Tan; R. Fedriani; Judy Schmidt)
If you take a closer look, you will see two bumps coming out of the back fold in the cloud, towards the top right and bottom left. These are one way we know the star is growing. As material is pulled towards the star, it begins to interact with the complex magnetic field, producing powerful plasma jets that fire on the axis. rotating.
These jets only last as long as material falls on the star, so once the star stops growing, the jets die down.
In fact, jets are one of the tools that prevent the star from becoming overgrown: they push material away close to the star, removing it from the reach of the gravitational pull. . Stellar winds, once a thermonuclear melt is ignited in the star’s core, also push material away.
The remnants of the disk, once the star is formed, come together to form planets and asteroids and other planetary system materials.
We look at clouds like AFLG 5180 to learn more about these processes, but it can be a bit tricky. The dusty clouds are very thick, which makes it difficult to see what is happening inside.
That’s where instruments like Hubble come in handy: in addition to visible light, the Wide Field 3 Camera sees in infrared, penetrating into the dust, revealing the bright treasure of young stars inside.
And, of course, these images allow you to take a moment out of your day to think, amazingly, just how amazing we live.
If you want to download this image to use as wallpaper, you can find it on the Hubble website.