The latest image released by the Hubble Space Telescope is just beyond pale.
Just look to this. Simply daring. absolute cheek from her.
Here you are, thinking about your own mundane business, and then Hubble had to come and remind you that our universe is wonderful, mind-boggling, insanely gorgeous.
What you see is a nebula about 4,900 light-years away in the constellation of Gemini. It is called AFGL 5180 and is part of a vast complex of molecular clouds called Gem OB1.
Such thick molecular clouds are where the stars are born, and AFLG 5180 is no exception. It is spectacularly lit inside by a very young, hot star, which violently disturbs the space around it as it grows, carving vast cavities in the gas cloud.
To create a baby star, you need to start with a dense agglomeration in a cloud of cold molecular gas. If this group collapses under its own gravity, it will begin to form a star. As the protostar begins to spin, the material in the cloud around it forms a disk, twisting into the rising star, inexorably attracted by the reinforcing gravitational force.
(ESA / Hubble and NASA; JC Tan; R. Fedriani; Judy Schmidt)
If you take a close look, you can see two beams emanating from behind a fold in the cloud, to the top right and bottom left of the image. These are ways we know the star is rising. As the material is attracted to the star, it begins to interact with the complex magnetic field, producing strong jets of plasma that shoot along the axis of rotation.
These jets last only as long as the material falls on the star, so once the star stops growing, the jets will disappear.
In fact, jets are one of the mechanisms that prevent the star from growing ridiculously high: they push the material close to the star, removing it from gravitational attraction. Stellar winds, once the thermonuclear fusion has ignited in the core of the star, also push the material.
What is left of the disk, once the star has grown, will gather together to form planets and asteroids and other objects in the planetary system.
We look at clouds like the AFLG 5180 to learn more about these processes, but it can be a little difficult. Dusty clouds are really thick, which makes it difficult to see what’s going on inside.
Here instruments like Hubble are at hand: in addition to visible light, the wide-field camera 3 can see in the infrared, which penetrates into the dust, revealing the bright treasure of the young stars inside.
And, of course, these images allow you to take a moment out of your day to contemplate, amazed, how magnificent a Universe we live in is.
If you want to download this image for use as wallpaper, you can find it on the Hubble website.