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Nebulae and Gas Clouds
A Cosmic Hamburger  The object, nicknamed Gomez's Hamburger, is a sun-like star nearing the end of its life. It already has expelled large amounts of gas and dust and is on its way to becoming a colorful, glowing planetary nebula. The ingredients for the giant celestial hamburger are dust and light. The hamburger buns are light reflecting off dust and the patty is the dark band of dust in the middle. Ants in Space?  From ground-based telescopes, the so-called "ant nebula" (Menzel 3, or Mz 3) resembles the head and thorax of a garden-variety ant. This dramatic NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, showing 10 times more detail, reveals the "ant's" body as a pair of fiery lobes protruding from a dying, Sun-like star.<BR><BR>The Hubble images directly challenge old ideas about the last stages in the lives of stars. By observing Sun-like stars as they approach their deaths, the Hubble Heritage image of Mz 3 — along with pictures of other planetary nebulae — shows that our Sun's fate probably will be more interesting, complex, and striking than astronomers imagined just a few years ago. The remarkable Red Rectangle: Stairway to heaven?  One of the most unusual nebulae known in our Galaxy. Catalogued as HD 44179, this nebula is more commonly called the “Red Rectangle” because of its unique shape and color as seen with ground-based telescopes.
NGC 6302  The Bug Nebula, NGC 6302, here imaged with the 3.6 metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory by astronomer Romano L.M. Corradi. Gas Plume From a Newborn Star  A NASA Hubble Space Telescope picture of a hypersonic shock wave (lower right) of material moving at 148,000 miles per hour in the Orion Nebula, a star-forming region 1,500 light-years away. The Eagle Nebula  This eerie, dark structure, resembling an imaginary sea serpent's head, is a column of cool molecular hydrogen gas (two atoms of hydrogen in each molecule) and dust that is an incubator for new stars. The stars are embedded inside finger-like protrusions extending from the top of the nebula. Each 'fingertip' is somewhat larger than our own solar system.
The Hourglass Nebula  This is an image of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula located about 8, 000 light-years away, taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This Hubble image reveals the true shape of MyCn18 to be an hourglass with an intricate pattern of 'etchings' in its walls. This picture has been composed from three separate images taken in the light of ionized nitrogen (represented by red), hydrogen (green), and doubly-ionized oxygen (blue). Giant 'Twisters' in the Lagoon Nebula  This Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image reveals a pair of one-half light-year long interstellar 'twisters' -- eerie funnels and twisted-rope structures -- in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) which lies 5,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. Dark Globule in IC 1396  NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope image of a glowing stellar nursery provides a spectacular contrast to the opaque cloud seen in visible light (inset). The Elephant's Trunk Nebula is an elongated dark globule within the emission nebula IC 1396 in the constellation of Cepheus. Located at a distance of 2,450 light-years, the globule is a condensation of dense gas that is barely surviving the strong ionizing radiation from a nearby massive star. The globule is being compressed by the surrounding ionized gas. The dark globule is seen in silhouette at visible-light wavelengths, backlit by the illumination of a bright star located to the left of the field of view.<BR><BR>The Spitzer Space Telescope pierces through the obscuration to reveal the birth of new protostars, or embryonic stars, and previously unseen young stars. The infrared image was obtained by Spitzer's infrared array camera. The image is a four-color composite of invisible light, showing emissions from wavelengths of 3.6 microns (blue), 4.5 microns (green), 5.8 microns (orange) and 8.0 microns (red). The filamentary appearance of the globule results from the sculpting effects of competing physical processes. The winds from a massive star, located to the left of the image, produce a dense circular rim comprising the 'head' of the globule and a swept-back tail of gas.<BR><BR>A pair of young stars (LkHa 349 and LkHa 349c) that formed from the dense gas has cleared a spherical cavity within the globule head. While one of these stars is significantly fainter than the other in the visible-light image, they are of comparable brightness in the infrared Spitzer image. This implies the presence of a thick and dusty disc around LkHa 349c. Such circumstellar discs are the precursors of planetary systems. They are much thicker in the early stages of stellar formation when the placental planet-forming material (gas and dust) is still present.
A rose blooming in space  Resembling a delicate rose floating in space, the nebula N11A is seen in a new light in a true-color image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Fierce radiation from massive stars embedded at the center of N11A illuminates the surrounding gas with a soft fluorescent glow. N11A lies within a spectacular star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small nearby companion galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy, visible from the Southern Hemisphere. This nebula is particularly interesting for astronomers since it is the smallest and most compact nebula in that region and represents the most recent massive star formation event there. The excellent imaging power of Hubble has enabled astronomers to see this nebula in more detail and to study the structure of the hot gas envelope as well as the stars embedded in its center. Shocks and strong stellar winds from the recently born, massive stars in the bright core of N11A have scooped out a cavity in the gas and dust. The fierce radiation causes the surrounding gas to fluoresce in a way similar to a neon light. Hubble's image provides a much clearer picture of the nebula, making it possible for the first time to identify the stars that actually make it glow. Such information is essential for a better understanding of the formation of massive stars, that is, stars more than 10 times as heavy as our Sun. 'We need to study the properties of star-forming regions in our neighbouring galaxies to understand how stars are formed in the distant, young Universe, ' explains Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri who led the team studying these Hubble observations. Supernova 1987A   The Great Orion Nebula  This is one of the nearest regions of very recent star formation (300,000 years ago). The nebula is a giant gas cloud illuminated by the brightest of the young hot stars at the top of the picture. Many of the fainter young stars are surrounded by disks of dust and gas, that are slightly more than twice the diameter of the solar system (or 100 Astronomical Units in diameter).
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