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Nebulae and Gas Clouds
Full HST WFPC2 Image of Trifid Nebula   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 (upper left) -- in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) which lies 5, 000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. NGC 604 in Galaxy M33  This is a Hubble Space Telescope image (right) of a vast nebula called NGC 604, which lies in the neighboring spiral galaxy M33, located 2.7 million light-years away in the constellation Triangulum.
Fireworks in the Sky  The light from the exploding star reached Earth 320 years ago. The dead star's shredded remains are called Cassiopeia A, or 'Cas A' for short. Cas A is the youngest known supernova remnant in our Milky Way Galaxy and resides 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, so the star actually blew up 10, 000 years before the light reached Earth in the late 1600s. The Cat's Eye Nebula  This Hubble Space Telescope image shows one of the most complex planetary nebulae ever seen, NGC 6543, nicknamed the 'Cat's Eye Nebula.' Hubble reveals surprisingly intricate structures including concentric gas shells, jets of high-speed gas and unusual shock-induced knots of gas. Estimated to be 1, 000 years old, the nebula is a visual 'fossil record' of the dynamics and late evolution of a dying star. Ant nebula  The nebula, imaged on July 20, 1997, and June 30, 1998, by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, was observed by Drs. Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; Bruce Balick of the University of Washington in Seattle; and Vincent Icke of Leiden University in the Netherlands. JPL designed and built the camera.<BR><BR>The Ant Nebula, whose technical name is Mz3, resembles the head and thorax of an ant when observed with ground-based telescopes. The new Hubble image, with 10 times the resolution revealing 100 times more detail, shows the "ant's" body as a pair of fiery lobes protruding from a dying, Sun- like star. The Ant Nebula is located between 3,000 and 6,000 light years from Earth in the southern constellation Norma.<BR><BR>The image challenges old ideas about what happens to dying stars. This observation, along with other pictures of various remnants of dying stars called planetary nebulae, shows that our Sun's fate will probably be much more interesting, complex and dramatic than astronomers previously believed.<BR><BR>Although the ejection of gas from the dying star in the Ant Nebula is violent, it does not show the chaos one might expect from an ordinary explosion, but instead shows symmetrical patterns. One possibility is that the central star has a closely orbiting companion whose gravitational tidal forces shape the outflowing gas. A second possibility is that as the dying star spins, its strong magnetic fields are wound up into complex shapes like spaghetti in an eggbeater. Electrically charged winds, much like those in our Sun's solar wind but millions of times denser and moving at speeds up to 1,000 kilometers per second (more than 600 miles per second) from the star, follow the twisted field lines on their way out into space.
M8 (Lagoon Nebula) and M20 (Trifid Nebula)   N44C nebula  Resembling the hair in Botticelli's famous portrait of the birth of Venus, an image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured softly glowing filaments streaming from hot young stars in a nearby nebula. Closeup of Jet in Trifid Nebula  
Hubble Hunts Down Binary Objects at the Fringe of Our Solar System  An aging star's last hurrah is creating a flurry of glowing knots of gas that appear to be streaking through space in this close-up image of the Dumbbell Nebula, taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The Dumbbell, a nearby planetary nebula residing more than 1,200 light-years away, is the result of an old star that has shed its outer layers in a unique display of color. Closeup of Proplyd in Trifid Nebula   Three Great Eyes on Kepler's Supernova Remnant  NASA's three Great Observatories -- the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory -- joined forces to probe the expanding remains of a supernova, called Kepler's supernova remnant, first seen 400 years ago by sky watchers, including astronomer Johannes Kepler.
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