Skip to main content

Hubble captures an image of the stunning star-forming Prawn Nebula

When you look to the stars, you might expect to see a planet, a star, or even the International Space Station, but this week’s Hubble image shows something rather unexpected: A Prawn. The image shows the beautiful Prawn Nebula, located around 6,000 light-years away in the tail portion of the constellation Scorpius.

Despite the nebula’s large size, spanning over 250 light-years, it is rarely imaged as it is very dim, emitting only a small amount of light. The stars which can be seen appear to be a blue-white color, but in addition to this most of the stars within the nebula emit light in other portions of the spectrum that are invisible to the human eye. Hubble images in both the visible light wavelength and the infrared, allowing it to see more details of the beautiful swirls of dust and gas.

Hubble image of a small section of the Prawn Nebula in both visible and invisible infrared light, capturing dazzling detail of the nebula’s structure.
The Prawn Nebula is a massive stellar nursery located in the constellation Scorpius, about 6,000 light-years from Earth. Though the nebula stretches 250 light-years and covers a space four times the size of the full moon, it emits light primarily in wavelengths the human eye cannot detect, making it extremely faint to earthbound viewers. NASA, ESA, and J. Tan (Chalmers University of Technology); Processing; Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

“The Prawn Nebula, also known as IC 4628, is an emission nebula, which means its gas has been energized, or ionized, by the radiation of nearby stars,” Hubble scientists explain. “The radiation from these massive stars strips electrons from the nebula’s hydrogen atoms. As the energized electrons revert from their higher-energy state to a lower-energy state by recombining with hydrogen nuclei, they emit energy in the form of light, causing the nebula’s gas to glow. In this image, red indicates the presence of ionized iron (Fe II) emission.”

The nebula is a busy star-forming region, creating both individual stars and clusters of stars. In between these points of light are voids or cavities, which are created when hot stars give off stellar winds which blow away matter like dust and gas.

To show the nebula in its full context, the Hubble scientists also released this image of the full nebula, showing where this particular zoom-in image fits into the whole:

Star map showing location of the Prawn Nebula.
The Prawn Nebula lies south of the star Antares in the constellation Scorpius, the Scorpion. Hubble’s focused view captures just a small portion of the vast star-forming region. NASA, ESA, J. Tan (Chalmers University of Technology), and ESO; Processing; Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

Editors' Recommendations

Georgina Torbet
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Hubble watches an extreme exoplanet being stripped by its star
This artist's illustration shows a planet (dark silhouette) passing in front of the red dwarf star AU Microscopii.

Of the many strange exoplanets discovered to date, one of the most extreme has to be a world called AU Mic b. This Neptune-sized planet orbits close enough to its star that a year there lasts just over a week, and it is bombarded by dramatic flares from its host star which cook the planet with radiation.

Recently, Hubble observed this system to learn more about the relationship between the exoplanet and its star, technically called AU Microscopii.  The planet's hydrogen atmosphere is blown away by radiation from the star, but there were confusing findings that seemed to show that no atmosphere was being lost at some times, but significant amounts of atmosphere were lost at other times.

Read more
James Webb captures vast structure created by newborn stars
A high-resolution image of a tightly bound pair of actively forming stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in near-infrared light.

Newborn stars are often active and glow brightly, but on some rare occasions, they can create something truly epic: a vast and bright two-lobed structure called a Herbig-Haro object.

These are formed when a new star gives off narrow jets of ionized gas, which shoot off in opposite directions and collide with nearby dust and gas. As the jets hit the material at speeds of hundreds of miles per second, they sculpt vast nebula-like clouds which can be hundreds of light-years across.

Read more
Hubble observes a galaxy that hosted an epic supernova explosion
The tranquil spiral galaxy UGC 12295.

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a stunning view of a spiral galaxy called UGC 12295, located nearly 200 million light-years away. This galaxy appears face-on from Earth, meaning we can get a great view of its structure and spiral arms -- captured here using Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 instrument.

The galaxy UGC 12295 is best known for being the location of a supernova observed in 2015. A supernova occurs when a massive star, much bigger than our sun, runs out of fuel and comes to the end of its life. As the star has less and less fuel and no longer produces as much outward pressure from the fusion occurring at its core, the gravity pushing in on the star takes over and causes the star to collapse. This collapse happens so fast that it creates a shockwave that causes the star's outer layers to explode, an event called a supernova.

Read more