In celebration of the 24th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (on April 24, 1990) astronomers have taken an infrared-light portrait of a roiling region of starbirth located 6,400 light-years away.
The Hubble mosaic unveils a collection of carved knots of gas and dust in a small portion of the Monkey Head Nebula (also known as NGC 2174 and Sharpless Sh2-252). The nebula is a star-forming region that hosts dusky dust clouds silhouetted against glowing gas.
Massive, newly formed stars near the center of the nebula (and toward the right in this image) are blasting away at dust within the nebula. Ultraviolet light from these bright stars helps carve the dust into giant pillars. The nebula is mostly composed of hydrogen gas, which becomes ionized by the ultraviolet radiation.
As the interstellar dust particles are warmed from the radiation from the stars in the center of the nebula, they heat up and begin to glow at infrared wavelengths.
The image demonstrates Hubble’s powerful infrared vision and offers a tantalizing hint of what scientists can expect from the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.
Observations of NGC 2174 were taken in February 2014.
This graphic compares visible-light and infrared views of the same detailed area in the star-forming nebula NGC 2174 from the Hubble Space Telescope. On the left is a visible-light image made by WFPC2 in 2001 and on the right is an image made by the WFC3 infrared camera. Infrared light penetrates more dust and gas than visible light, allowing main details to become visible. A jet of material from a newly forming star is visible in one of the pillars, just above and left of center in the right-hand image. Several galaxies are seen in the infrared view, much more distant than the columns of dust and gas.
This graphic shows the location of the infrared image from the Hubble Space Telescope in a wider view of the region of NGC 2174. On the left is a ground-based image of the star-forming nebula in visible light by an amateur astrophotographer, with an outline showing the area of the detailed Hubble image. On the right is a small detail of a star-forming column in the nebula, made by Hubble’s WFC3 infrared camera.
Image credits: NASA and ESA.
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Filed under: Space Telescopes
