This
Hubble Space Telescope image of the Eagle Nebula -- a region of star formation
located in the constellation Serpens -- was first released in 1995, at about
the time that people were beginning to understand that the Hubble Space Telescope
was truly fixed and doing the science that it was meant to do.
A combination of timing, compelling science story, and striking aesthetics made this one of the most famous astrophotographs in history. Quoting from the original press release:
Eerie, dramatic pictures from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show newborn stars emerging from "eggs" — not the barnyard variety — but rather dense, compact pockets of interstellar gas called evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs). Hubble found the "EGGs," appropriately enough, in the Eagle nebula, a nearby star-forming region 6,500 light- years away in the constellation Serpens.
"For a long time astronomers have speculated about what processes control the sizes of stars — about why stars are the sizes that they are," said Jeff Hester of Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. "Now in M16 we seem to be watching at least one such process at work right in front of our eyes."
See the original press release or download a full sized version of the image.
The image was one of five images selected for a series of stamps issued on the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope:
Like
the Eagle Nebula, the Trifid Nebula is a region in
which intense radiation from a nearby hot, massive, luminous star is triggering
the formation of a
new generation of low-mass "Sun-like" stars. This Hubble Space Telescope image
is a continuation of the work begun with the Eagle Nebula, and is also the
picture that graces of the cover of 21st
Century Astronomy, which in some ways I like to think of more as a piece
of nonfiction for the informed layman than as a textbook. (This is a hint to
suggest that a serious reader might enjoy the book!)
The
Crab Nebula is the remnant
of the explosion of a massive star -- a supernova -- witnessed by Chinese astronomers
on July 4, 1054 AD.
At the heart of the Crab Nebula is the Crab Pulsar, a collapsed neutron star which has a mass greater than that of the Sun, but which could fit within the city limits of Phoenix. The Crab Pulsar has a magnetic field over a trillion times that of Earth, and is spinning 30 times a second. This creates extreme conditions in which matter and antimatter are formed from pure energy, then flung out into space at close to the speed of light. As relativistic electrons and positrons spin around magnetic fields, they give off an eerie glow that can be seen in X-rays, visible light, and radio emission. The image at left is a composite showing X-ray emission in blue, visible light in green, and radio emission in red.
The
Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory were used to make
movies of
the motion of this material as it streams out into space. Full
resolution versions of the movies are available.
Images
of the Crab
Synchrotron filaments show the material that was blasted into space by
the explosion itself. This expanding cloud of debris carries with it the chemical
legacy of the material formed in star. The atoms of which our bodies are made
were formed in such stars that lived and died long before our Sun and Solar
System formed 4.5 billion years ago.