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.

This colorful image of the globular star cluster Terzan 12 is a spectacular example of how dust in space affects starlight coming from background objects. A collection of stars organized in a spherical configuration is known as a globular star cluster. In globular clusters, gravity holds the stars together, with a concentration of more stars in the center. On the periphery of the Milky Way are roughly 150 old globular clusters. These clusters circle the galactic core like bees buzzing around a hive, yet they are located far above and below the galaxy’s pancake-flat plane. This globular cluster is covered in gas and dust that absorb and change the sunlight coming from it because of its placement deep within the Milky Way in the constellation Sagittarius.

Astronomers frequently struggle to distinguish between the forest and the trees because of how congested space may seem. The globular star cluster Terzan 12 is an excellent illustration. It is a dense beehive of hundreds of thousands of stars crammed close together, like all globular star clusters. Consider it like a snow globe. Shake the globe to simulate the erratic motion of a cluster of stars. The oldest residents of our Milky Way are globular clusters. Some of their burned-out stars are almost as old as the cosmos itself, and they contain aging stars. Even at their old age, globular clusters are active. They revolve around our galaxy’s pancake-flat star disk both above and below.

About Hubble Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid, will return to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023, with material from asteroid Bennu. When it arrives, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will release the sample capsule for a safe landing in the Utah desert. The pristine material from Bennu – rocks and dust collected from the asteroid’s surface in 2020 – will offer generations of scientists a window into the time when the Sun and planets were forming about 4.5 billion years ago.

It was launched on Sept. 8, 2016, the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, spacecraft traveled to a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu (formerly 1999 RQ36) and collected a sample of rocks and dust from the surface. 

The spacecraft is on its way back to Earth to deliver the sample on Sept. 24, 2023. When it arrives, the spacecraft will release the capsule containing pieces of Bennu over Earth’s atmosphere. The capsule will parachute to the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range, where the OSIRIS-REx team will be waiting to retrieve it.

OSIRIS-REx is now on its way back to Earth, bringing asteroid dust with it. It will launch a special capsule in 2023 that will fall through Earth’s atmosphere and settle safely on our planet. This is significant since it has been a long time since NASA returned samples from space, as it did during the Apollo lunar missions.

Scientists will carefully examine the asteroid dust after the capsule has returned to Earth. It’s like unpacking a fascinating parcel from space, and it could help us understand how our solar system developed and how life began on Earth.

The OSIRIS-REx mission isn’t just for scientists; it’s also a thrilling experience that draws people from all over the world together. It reminds us of the amazing things we can discover when we collaborate to explore the universe. So, as we wait for the asteroid soil, let us celebrate this mission’s incredible voyage and the knowledge it may bring to humanity.