The 9.5-year-old cloud photo within the Eagle Nebula celebrates the upcoming 35th birthday of the space telescope.
ESA/Hubble and NASA, K. Nolon
Looking like a bird ready to fly from a post, this dusty filament within the Eagle Nebula was recently captured in a complicated detail by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Also known as M16, this nebula is some 7,000 light-year from the earth that is in the snake in the constellation snake and surrounds an open star cluster. This column of cold gas and dust is 9.5 light-year long and is made up of cold hydrogen gas, which serves as a material to make new stars. Newly formed stars produce powerful intersteller winds and ultraviolet light, which in this case have already formed a cloud in a long column that appears outwards near one end. Eventually, this entire tendril will be erased by radiation from the ongoing star formation.
In this image, various wavelengths of color emissions highlight. Blue is from ionized oxygen. Lively red is hydrogen and is from orange starlete that is cut through deep dust.
This image is not a new from Hubble – in fact it was taken 20 years ago in 2005. However, after undergoing new image processing techniques, the wide area looks far better than before. This image was released as a festive part of Hubble’s contribution to science in the last 35 years.
Hubble was launched on 24 April 1990 as a joint project between NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) near the Earth’s orbit. Since then it has captured more than 1.6 million comments of more than 53,000 astronomical items. In exchange for cakes and balloons, NASA and ESA are gifting such people recruiting images that include Sombrero Galaxy (M104) and NGC 346 in small Magalanicical Clouds.
