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Nebulae and Gas Clouds
The Glowing Eye of NGC 6751  A giant celestial "eye," known as planetary nebula NGC 6751. Glowing in the constellation Aquila, the nebula is a cloud of gas ejected several thousand years ago from the hot star visible in its center. Planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. They are shells of gas thrown off by Sun-like stars nearing the ends of their lives. The star's loss of its outer gaseous layers exposes the hot stellar core, whose strong ultraviolet radiation then causes the ejected gas to fluoresce as the planetary nebula. The Spirograph Nebula  Glowing like a multi-faceted jewel, the planetary nebula IC 418 lies about 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lepus. In this picture, the Hubble telescope reveals some remarkable textures weaving through the nebula. Their origin, however, is still uncertain. Ghostly Reflections in the Pleiades  The Hubble Space Telescope has caught the eerie, wispy tendrils of a dark interstellar cloud being destroyed by the passage of one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades star cluster. Like a flashlight beam shining off the wall of a cave, the star is reflecting light off the surface of pitch black clouds of cold gas laced with dust. These are called reflection nebulae.
Rosette Nebula  The Rosette Nebula. R136  A panoramic portrait of a vast, sculpted landscape of gas and dust where thousands of stars are being born. This fertile star-forming region, called the 30 Doradus Nebula, has a sparkling stellar centerpiece: the most spectacular cluster of massive stars in our cosmic neighborhood of about 25 galaxies. The mosaic picture shows that ultraviolet radiation and high-speed material unleashed by the stars in the cluster, called R136 [the large blue blob left of center], are weaving a tapestry of creation and destruction, triggering the collapse of looming gas and dust clouds and forming pillar-like structures that are incubators for nascent stars. NICMOS Peers Into Heart of Dying Star  The Egg Nebula, also known as CRL 2688, is shown as it appears in visible light with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2).
IC Beauty  The Hubble telescope reveals a rainbow of colors in this dying star, called IC 4406. Like many other so-called planetary nebulae, IC 4406 exhibits a high degree of symmetry. The nebula's left and right halves are nearly mirror images of the other. If we could fly around IC 4406 in a spaceship, we would see that the gas and dust form a vast donut of material streaming outward from the dying star. We don't see the donut shape in this photograph because we are viewing IC 4406 from the Earth-orbiting Hubble telescope. From this vantage point, we are seeing the side of the donut. Hubble Reveals New Details in a Supernova's Blast Wave  This is an image of a small portion of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1991. The Cygnus Loop marks the edge of a bubble-like, expanding blast wave from a colossal stellar explosion which occurred about 15,000 years ago. Southern Crab Nebula  A tempestuous relationship between an unlikely pair of stars may have created an oddly shaped, gaseous nebula that resembles an hourglass nestled within an hourglass.
N159 in the Large Magellanic Cloud  A NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope view of a turbulent cauldron of starbirth, called N159, taking place 170, 000 light-years away in our satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Torrential stellar winds from hot newborn massive stars within the nebula sculpt ridges, arcs, and filaments in the vast cloud, which is over 150 light-years across. Blowing Cosmic Bubbles  This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals an expanding shell of glowing gas surrounding a hot, massive star in our Milky Way Galaxy. The shell is being shaped by strong stellar winds of material and radiation produced by the bright star at the left, which is 10 to 20 times more massive than our Sun. Supersonic Exhaust From Nebula  M2-9 is a striking example of a 'butterfly' or a bipolar planetary nebula. Another more revealing name might be the 'Twin Jet Nebula.' If the nebula is sliced across the star, each side of it appears much like a pair of exhausts from jet engines. Indeed, because of the nebula's shape and the measured velocity of the gas, in excess of 200 miles per second, astronomers believe that the description as a super-super-sonic jet exhaust is quite apt. Ground-based studies have shown that the nebula's size increases with time, suggesting that the stellar outburst that formed the lobes occurred just 1,200 years ago.
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