Happy Birthday Hubble!
To celebrate its 30 years of scientific exploration and discovery, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is releasing two exclusive images of the “Cosmic Reef”, a star-forming region inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, about 163,000 light years from Earth.
In this unique image we witness how massive, hot, newborn stars can sculpt and illuminate the regions where they were born. Bright, hefty stars, each 10-20 times the sun's mass, unleash fierce winds of charged particles shaping the larger red nebula, NGC 2014, and form bubble like structures. The blue highlights super heated oxygen in the nebula while the red gas indicates the presence of hydrogen and nitrogen; life giving elements condense amongst these stellar clouds.
Nearby, the smaller blue nebula, NGC 2020, is being illuminated and shaped by a newly formed Wolf-Rayet star, a very unique and rare type of star which ejects its outer gas layers and exposes the core of the star.
To learn more about Hubble and its anniversary visit their website: hubblesite.org. For images and information on the Hubble mission, visit: www.nasa.gov/hubble