Hubble Looks at Light and Dark in the Universe
This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a variety of intriguing
cosmic phenomena.
Surrounded by bright stars, towards the upper middle of the frame we see a
small young stellar object (YSO) known as SSTC2D J033038.2+303212. Located in
the constellation of Perseus, this star is in the early stages of its life and
is still forming into a fully-grown star. In this view from Hubble’s Advanced
Camera for Surveys(ACS) it appears to have a murky chimney of material emanating
outwards and downwards, framed by bright bursts of gas flowing from the star
itself. This fledgling star is actually surrounded by a bright disk of material
swirling around it as it forms — a disc that we see edge-on from our
perspective.
However, this small bright speck is dwarfed by its cosmic neighbor towards
the bottom of the frame, a clump of bright, wispy gas swirling around as it
appears to spew dark material out into space. The bright cloud is a reflection
nebula known as [B77] 63, a cloud of interstellar gas that is reflecting light
from the stars embedded within it. There are actually a number of bright stars
within [B77] 63, most notably the emission-line star LkHA 326, and it nearby
neighbor LZK 18.
These stars are lighting up the surrounding gas and sculpting it into the
wispy shape seen in this image. However, the most dramatic part of the image
seems to be a dark stream of smoke piling outwards from [B77] 63 and its stars —
a dark nebula called Dobashi 4173. Dark nebulae are incredibly dense clouds of
pitch-dark material that obscure the patches of sky behind them, seemingly
creating great rips and eerily empty chunks of sky. The stars speckled on top of
this extreme blackness actually lie between us and Dobashi 4173.
European Space Agency
Credit:
ESA/NASA
NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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