Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

See a close-up of the stunning Lagoon Nebula in new Hubble image

Georgina Torbet
By

The image of the week shared by researchers working with the Hubble Space Telescope this week is a real stunner, showing the open cluster NGC 6530. This cluster of thousands of stars is shrouded in dust and makes up a small part of the huge and beautiful Lagoon Nebula.

Located 4350 light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius, the distinctive smoke-like shapes of the cluster are formed from a cloud of interstellar dust and gas which is feeding the formation of new stars.

A portion of the open cluster NGC 6530 appears as a roiling wall of smoke studded with stars.
A portion of the open cluster NGC 6530 appears as a roiling wall of smoke studded with stars in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 6530 is a collection of several thousand stars lying around 4,350 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. ESA/Hubble & NASA, O. De Marco; Acknowledgment: M.H. Özsaraç

To investigate this scene, Hubble used two of its instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Hubble scientists write that astronomers “scoured the region in the hope of finding new examples of proplyds, a particular class of illuminated protoplanetary discs surrounding newborn stars. The vast majority of proplyds have been found in only one region, the nearby Orion Nebula. This makes understanding their origin and lifetimes in other astronomical environments challenging.”

Recommended Videos

This image combines data from the Advanced Camera for Surveys with data from a ground-based instrument, the OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope which is located in Chile.

Related

Hubble previously imaged the Lagoon Nebula in one of its most famous photos, which was shared to celebrate the telescope’s 28th anniversary. This image also showed just a part of the full nebula, which is an enormous 55 light-years wide and 20 light-years tall.

The nebula is also known as Messier 8 but was named the Lagoon Nebula for its wide dust lane which looks like a lagoon in deep field images. Up close, you can see more details in the dust structures which are blown about and sculpted by the stellar winds in and among the dust, created as new stars are formed.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Hubble captures a stunning ultraviolet image of Jupiter
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals an ultraviolet view of Jupiter.

You can now see Jupiter in a whole new way, thanks to a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Showing the planet in the ultraviolet wavelength, the image highlights the planet's Great Red Spot -- an enormous storm larger than the width of the entire Earth that has been raging for hundreds of years.

The image was released in celebration of Jupiter reaching opposition, meaning it is directly opposite the sun as viewed from the Earth. That means that if you are a keen stargazer, now is a great time to go and look for Jupiter in the night sky as it will look its biggest and brightest.

Read more
NASA releases ‘ghostly cosmic hand’ image for Halloween
NASA's image of a ghostly cosmic hand in deep space.

To mark Halloween, NASA has released a spooky image of what it describes as a "ghostly cosmic hand."

It actually shows MSH 15-52, a cloud of energetic particles that resembles a human hand.

Read more
Hubble observes mysterious bright explosion in the middle of nowhere
An artist’s concept of one of the brightest explosions ever seen in space.

The Hubble Space Telescope recently observed something strange: an extremely bright, extremely fast flash of light that popped up in the middle of nowhere. Technically known as a Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient (LFBOT), the odd thing about this rare event was that it occurred outside of a galaxy.

These flashes have been observed only a few times since they were discovered in 2018, and this particular event was named The Finch. Hubble was used to track the flash's origin point, which was in between two galaxies: 50,000 light-years away from a larger spiral galaxy and around 15,000 light-years away from a smaller galaxy. This has astronomers puzzled, as these events were thought to issue from inside galaxies where stars are forming -- but this event happened far away from any star-forming region.

Read more