Just Another Nebula Picture from Hubble
We get jaded, but the images don't stop being amazing
Used to be, every new image from the Hubble Space Telescope was cause for celebration. Over the past 34 years, the orbiting observatory has delighted our visual senses while transforming our understanding of the cosmos. But sometimes, it just sends back pretty pictures for us to awe over. This is one of those.
This new image reveals gas and dust in a nebula called RCW 7, which sits about 5,300 light-years away. This is the material of star birth. From NASA:
Under the influence of gravity, parts of these molecular clouds collapse until they coalesce into very young, developing stars, called protostars, which are still surrounded by spinning discs of leftover gas and dust. The protostars forming in RCW 7 are particularly massive, giving off strongly ionizing radiation and fierce stellar winds that transformed the nebula into a H II region.
H II regions are filled with hydrogen ions — H I refers to a normal hydrogen atom, while H II is hydrogen that lost its electron making it an ion. Ultraviolet radiation from the massive protostars excites the hydrogen in the nebula, causing it to emit light that gives this nebula its soft pinkish glow.
Nebula RCW 7 won’t be around forever. As massive new stars form, their heavy radiation and strong stellar winds will blow the remaining gas and dust away. What’s left will the be obliterated when the massive stars explode as supernovas.