The Hubble Space Telescope has captured A glimpse of an incredible on its 31st anniversary of the launching of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1990. One of the brightest stars in our Galaxy, this giant luminous blue variable star known as a G Karane is huge, 70 times more massive than our sun and shining with the brilliance of 1,000,000 Suns.The star is surrounded by a glowing Halo of gas and dust. This vast structure was created from giant eruptions from the star about 10,000 years ago, creating an expanding shell that is now nearly 5 light years across. Similar to the distance from our sun to its nearest neighbor star, the outburst expelled the star’s outer layers, blowing out material nearly ten times the mass of our sun. The nebula around the star from these ancient eruptions is being impacted by a powerful wind of charged particles flowing out from the star at 1,000,000 kilometers per hour, 10 times faster than the nebula itself is expanding. As this outflowing gas slams into the slower moving outer nebula, it creates a snow plow effect, clearing A cavity around the star and sculpting structures in the nebula.
Searing radiation from the star is lighting up the nebula as seen by Hubble in both visible light and in the ultraviolet light that can only be seen from space. Red colors indicate glowing hydrogen gas laced with nitrogen gas at the upper left in the image, the diffuse red glow shows a region where the stellar wind has broken through a tenuous region of material and swept it into space. Blue features shaped like tadpoles and bubbles are dust clumps shaped by the stellar wind and illuminated by the star’s reflected light. This incredible image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows how even one star can be incredibly beautiful and powerful as it impacts its surrounding environment. Since Hubble orbits above the Earth’s atmosphere, it can give us a clear, detailed view of this kind of awe inspiring beauty and activity in the universe. For the past 31 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed the way we think of space and our place in the cosmos. Hubble has revealed an incredible diversity of stars and gives us pristine views into beautiful interstellar nebulas where new stars and their surrounding disks of dust and planets continue to form.