Stellar diamonds on display
Posted: Tuesday, October 02, 2007 7:31 PM by Alan Boyle
Young stars glitter like jewels spread on red-brown velvet in a new picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble’s view of the star-forming nebula NGC 3603 reveals thousands of hot suns, nestled amid dark clouds of dust 20,000 light-years from Earth.
Today’s image is just a foretaste of what you’ll see in the latest installment of "Space Shots."
There are at least three stages of starbirth on view in today's Hubble Heritage picture, which was snapped by the telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2005. The hot, blue stars represent the brightest stage. If you scan the zoomable version of the image, you can count thousands of those sparkling starlets.
J. Maíz Apellániz / IAA / NASA / ESA / STScI |
The nebula NGC 3603 sparkles with starbirth in a
photo from the Hubble Space Telescope.
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The intense radiation from those stars are blowing away gas and dust in the central region of the nebula, creating a clear bubble surrounded by those red-brown clouds. As described in today's image advisory from the Space Telescope Science Institute, the radiation's blast has sculpted tall, dark fingers of dense gas, measuring light-years in length. Those fingers are similar to the cosmic EGGs (evaporating gaseous globules) seen in Hubble's famous "Pillars of Creation" photo of the Eagle Nebula - and could hide infant stars within.
The subtlest stage of starbirth may well be the black splotches visible in the upper right corner of the image: Those black patches are known as Thackeray's globules or Bok globules, and they're thought to be composed of dense dust and gas. "Resembling an insect's cocoon, a Bok globule may be undergoing a gravitational collapse on its way to forming new stars," Hubble's scientists say.
The star-forming region IC 2944, photographed by Hubble several years ago, provides even clearer examples of the dark globules.
NGC 3603 is one of our Milky Way's most massive young star clusters, lying in the southern constellation Carina. For an earlier view of the scene, check out this image from 1999, captured by Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. It's also worth visiting the European Space Agency's Hubble site for cool videos about NGC 3603. And for still more Hubble highlights, click through our slide show of the telescope's greatest hits (be sure to open your browser window wide).
Who knows? Maybe there'll be an even more sparkling view of the nebula in the years ahead, after next year's final Hubble servicing mission. We'll certainly have sparkling views of the shuttle mission itself, thanks to the deal announced last week to film flight highlights in large-screen 3-D.
