ESA/Hubble & Nasa, K. Noll
Looking at a bird ready to take flight from a post, this dusty filament inside Eagle’s nebula has recently been caught in intricate detail by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Also known as M16, this nebula is located about 7000 light years from the earth in the constellation of Serpens the snake and surrounds an open star cluster. This cold gas and dust pillar extends for 9.5 light years and is composed of cold hydrogen gases, which acts as a material to create new stars. The newly formed stars generate powerful twenty interstellar and ultraviolet light, which in this case have already formed the cloud in a long pillar that seems to float outwards near one end. In the end all this viticch will be eroded by radiation from the formation of ongoing stars.
The colors in this image highlight different wavelengths of the issue. The blue is ionized oxygen. Vibrant red is hydrogen and orange comes from the star light that cut the darker dust.
This image is not new to Hubble – In fact, it was taken 20 years ago in 2005. However, after suffering new images of the images, the detailed region seems better than ever. This image was released as part of a celebration of Hubble’s contribution to science in the last 35 years.
Hubble was launched in Near Earth Orbit on April 24, 1990, as a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). Since then he has captured over 1.6 million observations of over 53,000 astronomical objects. Instead of the cake and balloons, NASA and ESA are giving public portrait images like this, including the Sombrero galaxy (M104) and NGC 346 in the small Magellanic cloud.
