NASAさんのインスタグラム写真 - (NASAInstagram)「Jennifer Wiseman, astrophysicist • This year, the Hubble Space Telescope gave us an incredible image for its 30th birthday. This image reveals a beautiful nursery for new stars in a nearby satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way. The bright, newly formed stars in the middle of this image are at least ten times more massive than our Sun. Powerful radiation from these stars is causing the surrounding gas to glow in stunning colors. The blue indicates oxygen gas heated to nearly 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The red indicates the presence of nitrogen and hydrogen. Those massive stars are also driving powerful winds of charged particles, which are sculpting out the bubble and ridge structures we can see across the nebula. The blue nebula at the lower left of the image is actually material ejected from a single huge star in the center. That star is 200,000 times brighter than our Sun. The whole region shows how dynamic our universe is with stars continuing to form and affect their surroundings. It's Hubble's exquisite vision from its orbit above Earth's atmosphere that gives us the ability to get a clear glimpse of this kind of incredible beauty and activity. The Hubble Space Telescope has changed the way we think of space and our place in the universe. Hubble has refined our understanding of the age of the universe and its rate of expansion. Through its deep fields it has peered across billions of light-years to reveal ancient, adolescent galaxies we can compare with our own Milky Way. It has shown us the telltale effects of mysterious dark energy and dark matter. And it has given us a front-row seat to these beautiful interstellar clouds and nebulas, where new stars and their surrounding disks of dust and planets continue to form. Hubble is in excellent technical health and is expected to continue its exploration of the universe for quite a few years to come. [1] Hubble image of galaxies NGC 2020 and NGC 2014 [2] Jennifer Wiseman and Eric Smith in Mission Control at Johnson Space Flight Center during the fifth servicing mission to Hubble in 2009 [3] Jennifer Wiseman shows Hubble galaxy images of M100 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Credit: NASA」12月29日 7時02分