We Keep Coming Back to Nebulae

A Celebration of Hubble’s 24th Year in Orbit

There’s nothing like a great picture of a nebula to stir up your imagination about distant stars and planets in space. Hubble Space Telescope has been taking images of big clouds of gas and dust ever since its first year in orbit, and those images remain some of the most popular and evocative space pictures. You find them all over the place — in books, planetarium shows, and once I even found some on the set of Star Trek: Voyager when I visited courtesy of writer Andre Bormanis.  Nebulae just say “space” to people. And, they’re cool to look at.

So, this month’s Hubble Favorite is the Monkey Head Nebula, which lies in the direction of the constellation Orion, which is home to vast clouds of gas and dust and star-forming regions. This nebula turns out to be a pretty busy place, cranking out stars like the bright ones you see here. In a previous entry, I talked about massive stars gobbling up the most star “stuff” as they formed, and that’s happening here, too. As these hot newborns evolve, they eat away at the clouds of gas and dust surrouding them, and that’s what gives starbirth nebulae their scalloped and sculpted appearance.

I’ve always been fascinated with the Orion Nebula. It seems to me to be the quintessential place to go learn about stars being born. In a few tens of millions of years, some of the most massive stars born in its clouds will start to die off in supernova explosions. When that happens, all their materials will get spread out to space, sowing the seeds for new stars, and maybe even some planets that happen to form around them. That’s one reason why starbirth nebulae are so interesting to study. Without them, we’d know much less about how our own Sun got its start some 5.5 billion years ago.