The Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 33rd birthday, and to mark the occasion, NASA has released breathtaking photos of a star-forming region.
The nebula is a cluster of interstellar gas and dust within the Perseus Molecular Cloud and is located about 960 light-years away.
Hubble’s colorful images, capable of imaging from the ultraviolet to the infrared, “show a fiery cauldron of glowing gas and black dust stirred up by hundreds of newly formed stars embedded in the dark cloud,” NASA wrote. Website.
To take these images, the telescope passes through a veil of dust near a “giant cloud of cold molecular hydrogen,” the raw material for the formation of new stars and planets, thanks to Earth’s gravity.
This view allows us to imagine the time when our Sun and our planets formed inside such a dusty molecular cloud, 4.6 billion years ago, as we can read in the description of the image.
Hubble was launched into Earth orbit on April 25, 1990 by NASA astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery. To date, the telescope has made approximately 1.6 million observations of nearly 52,000 celestial targets.
