Skip to main content

Hubble snaps an autumnal nebula glowing orange from young, hot stars

A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a nebula in the gorgeous colors of autumn, just in time for leaf-changing season in the northern hemisphere. It shows a part of a nebula called Westerhout 5, located 7,000 light-years away and also known as the Soul Nebula.

It is an emission nebula, meaning that its gorgeous colors and shapes are created by gas which has become ionized by starlight from bright, hot stars. As very massive stars are born and give off large gusts of radiation and streams of particles called stellar winds, these blow away nearby material which prevents more stars from forming too close. This creates cavities within the nebula, and in between these cavities more gas is pushed together. Then more stars can form in these now denser regions.

Recommended Videos

Just in time for the fall foliage season, this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features a glistening scene in red. It reveals a small region of the nebula Westerhout 5, which lies about 7,000 light-years from Earth. Suffused with bright red light, this luminous image hosts a variety of interesting features, including a free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globule (frEGG). The frEGG in this image is the small tadpole-shaped dark region in the upper center-left. This buoyant-looking bubble is lumbered with two names – [KAG2008] globule 13 and J025838.6+604259.
Just in time for the fall foliage season, this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features a glistening scene in red. It reveals a small region of the nebula Westerhout 5, which lies about 7,000 light-years from Earth. Suffused with bright red light, this luminous image hosts a variety of interesting features, including a free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globule (frEGG). The frEGG in this image is the small tadpole-shaped dark region in the upper center-left. This buoyant-looking bubble is lumbered with two names – [KAG2008] globule 13 and J025838.6+604259. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, ESA/Hubble, R. Sahai
One feature of note in this image is the dark region in the upper middle, which is an object called a free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globule (frEGG). This dense pocket of gas is more resistant to the radiation which is ionizing the gas around it, creating a kind of “egg” from which new stars can be born. The best-known example of EGGs is in the famous Pillars of Creation image, also taken by Hubble, which found these pockets of denser gas that appeared as bumps on the nebula’s columns.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

In this image, the EGGs are of a type called free-floating because they aren’t attached to a particular structure, but they do have a recognizable tadpole-like shape with a head and a tail. Eventually, these pockets of gas may incubate new stars as the density in the surrounding area increases and they become hotter, allowing a protostar to form inside.

Georgina Torbet
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
Hubble finds mysterious and elusive black hole
An international team of astronomers has used more than 500 images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope spanning two decades to detect seven fast-moving stars in the innermost region of Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. These stars provide compelling new evidence for the presence of an intermediate-mass black hole.

An international team of astronomers has used more than 500 images from the NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope spanning two decades to detect seven fast-moving stars in the innermost region of Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. These stars provide compelling new evidence of the presence of an intermediate-mass black hole. ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Häberle (MPIA)

There's something strange about black holes. Astronomers often find small black holes, which are between five times and 100 times the mass of the sun. And they often find huge supermassive black holes, which are hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun or even larger. But they almost never find black holes in between those two sizes.

Read more
James Webb snaps a colorful image of a star in the process of forming
L1527, shown in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), is a molecular cloud that harbors a protostar. It resides about 460 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. The more diffuse blue light and the filamentary structures in the image come from organic compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), while the red at the center of this image is an energized, thick layer of gases and dust that surrounds the protostar. The region in between, which shows up in white, is a mixture of PAHs, ionized gas, and other molecules.

L1527, shown in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), is a molecular cloud that harbors a protostar. It resides about 460 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

A stunning new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a young star called a protostar and the huge outflows of dust and gas that are thrown out as it consumes material from its surrounding cloud. This object has now been observed using two of Webb's instruments: a previous version that was taken in the near-infrared with Webb's NIRCam camera, and new data in the mid-infrared taken with Webb's MIRI instrument.

Read more
Hubble takes first image since switching to new pointing mode
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope features the galaxy NGC 1546.

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of the galaxy NGC 1546. NASA, ESA, STScI, David Thilker (JHU)

The Hubble Space Telescope has been through some troubles of late, and the way that it operates had to be changed recently to compensate for some degraded hardware. The telescope's three gyros, which help it to switch between different targets in the sky, have been experiencing issues, with one in particular frequently failing over recent months. NASA made the decision recently to change the way that Hubble points, and it now uses just one gyro at a time instead of all three in order to preserve the two remaining gyros for as long as possible.

Read more