Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI
The Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this Friday with the publication of the image of a “turbulent” star nursery located 163,000 light years away, a photograph that has been dubbed the “cosmic reef” because of its resemblance to the underwater world.
The image shows the giant nebula NGC 2014 and its neighboring NGC 2020, one of the many turbulent star nurseries the telescope has observed since it was launched on April 24, 1990 from the Cape Canaveral base (USA) and since then. orbits 560 kilometers from Earth.
The title of “Cosmic Reef” is due to the fact that NGC 2014 “resembles part of a coral reef that floats in a vast sea of stars”, explains in a statement NASA that, together with the European Space Agency (ESA) , operate the telescope.
The 2014 NGC nebula, dominated by red, and the NGC 2020 in blue, are illuminated by massive young stars and form part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Via Milky, about 163,000 light years away.
The star-forming regions seen in the image are dominated by the brightness of stars at least 10 times more massive than the Sun, which have lives of a few million years, compared to the 10 billion years of our star.
The telescope image “reveals how massive, energetic stars sculpt their homes of gas and dust,” Nasa says in a statement.
The Hubble Space Telescope “has shaped the imagination of an entire generation, inspiring not only scientists, but almost everyone,” according to Günther Hasinger, ESA’s director of science.
In addition, it has provided “breathtaking views of the universe, from nearby planets to the farthest galaxies” that they have observed so far, explained, for his part, the assistant administrator of Science of NASA, Thomas Zurbuchen.
The launch of a telescope as large as Hubble 30 years ago “was revolutionary” and this “astronomical wonder continues to provide revolutionary science today,” he added.
This Hubble image shows stars at the center of Caldwell 94, an open cluster that is only about 16 million years old.
Hubble has revolutionized modern astronomy with its more than 1.4 million observations that have served to know more about the formation of planets, stars and galaxies or about black holes, the accelerated expansion of the universe and the mysterious dark matter.
In addition, it has shown that beyond our sky, there is an impressive explosion of colors from the births of stars, nebulae, galaxies and planets, which form images of incredible beauty.
Named after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, the space telescope is similar in size to a bus, although cylindrical, weighs 11 tons, measures 13.2 meters and has a maximum diameter of 4.2 meters.
Edwin Hubble.
In these decades, Hubble has also become a cultural icon, and its images are in episodes of Star Trek or The Big Bang Theory, in addition to starring in album covers, posters and even T-shirt prints.
Hubble explores the sky relentlessly and on the occasion of its anniversary, an initiative has been launched so that people can know what they observed on their birthday. Simply enter the day and month of birth to see some fascinating universe.
