For
the 26th birthday of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers are
highlighting a Hubble image of an enormous bubble being blown into space
by a super-hot, massive star. The Hubble image of the Bubble Nebula, or
NGC 7635, was chosen to mark the 26th anniversary of the launch of
Hubble into Earth orbit by the STS-31 space shuttle crew on April 24,
1990
“As Hubble makes its 26th revolution around our home star, the sun, we
celebrate the event with a spectacular image of a dynamic and exciting
interaction of a young star with its environment. The view of the Bubble
Nebula, crafted from WFC-3 images, reminds us that Hubble gives us a
front row seat to the awe inspiring universe we live in,” said John
Grunsfeld, Hubble astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s
Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, in Washington, D.C.
The Bubble Nebula is seven light-years across—about one-and-a-half times
the distance from our sun to its nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha
Centauri, and resides 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation
Cassiopeia.
The seething star forming this nebula is 45 times more massive than our
sun. Gas on the star gets so hot that it escapes away into space as a
“stellar wind” moving at over four million miles per hour. This outflow
sweeps up the cold, interstellar gas in front of it, forming the outer
edge of the bubble much like a snowplow piles up snow in front of it as
it moves forward.
As the surface of the bubble's shell expands outward, it slams into
dense regions of cold gas on one side of the bubble. This asymmetry
makes the star appear dramatically off-center from the bubble, with its
location in the 10 o’clock position in the Hubble view.
Dense pillars of cool hydrogen gas laced with dust appear at the upper
left of the picture, and more “fingers” can be seen nearly face-on,
behind the translucent bubble.
The gases heated to varying temperatures emit different colors: oxygen
is hot enough to emit blue light in the bubble near the star, while the
cooler pillars are yellow from the combined light of hydrogen and
nitrogen. The pillars are similar to the iconic columns in the “Pillars
of Creation” Eagle Nebula. As seen with the structures in the Eagle
Nebula, the Bubble Nebula pillars are being illuminated by the strong
ultraviolet radiation from the brilliant star inside the bubble.
The Bubble Nebula was discovered in 1787 by William Herschel, a
prominent British astronomer. It is being formed by a proto-typical
Wolf-Rayet star, BD +60º2522, an extremely bright, massive, and
short-lived star that has lost most of its outer hydrogen and is now
fusing helium into heavier elements. The star is about four million
years old, and in 10 million to 20 million years, it will likely
detonate as a supernova.
Hubble’s Wide Field Camera-3 imaged the nebula in visible light with
unprecedented clarity in February 2016. The colors correspond to blue
for oxygen, green for hydrogen, and red for nitrogen. This information
will help astronomers understand the geometry and dynamics of this
complex system.
The Bubble Nebula is one of only a handful of astronomical objects that
have been observed with several different instruments onboard Hubble.
Hubble also imaged it with the Wide Field Planetary Camera (WFPC) in
September 1992, and with Wide Field Planetary Camera-2 (WFPC2) in April
1999.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation
between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space
Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts
Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association
of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
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