The Lagoon Nebula shines in stunning new image from Hubble
Young stars twinkle in a rainbow curtain of dust and gas in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
The image highlights NGC-6530, an open cluster of a few thousand stars more than 4,000 light-years away in interstellar space.
NGC-6530 is located in a vast cloud of dust and gas called the Lagoon Nebula. You may spot a slight streak of Lagoon Nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius on a dark night, but unfortunately human eyes cannot distinguish the dazzling array of colors at this distance. Nebulae are stellar nurseries, where hydrogen gas collapses over millions of years to form stars.
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Hubble captured this image as scientists scanned the Lagoon Nebula for structures called proplyds, a kind of protoplanetary disk that surrounds newborn stars.
All stars form in balls of gas and dust that collapse inward. As the star grows, the spinning blob flattens into a disc. Over billions of years, the material in this disk collides, sometimes sticking together and growing from pebbles into planets. This is how all solar systems are formed, including ours. So scientists are looking for protoplanetary disks to study solar system training.
THE The Hubble Space Telescope has been instrumental in unveiling growing planetary systems around newborn stars, and the James Webb Space Telescope usher in a new era of observations. With JWST’s even more sensitive and powerful cameras, astronomers will be able to dive even deeper into stellar nurseries like the Lagoon Nebula.
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