Nebula November: New Hubble image shows stars being born out of a nebula

As NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is on a Nebula November run, it shared another image on Tuesday but this time it offers more scope for exploration. In this photo, stars can be seen churning out of the nebula filled with clouds of gas and dust. Located in the constellation Aquila, this particular nebula called ‘B-Type star factory’ is named G035.20-0.74 and is known for producing a particular kind of massive star known as a B-Type star. These stars are hot, young, and blue stars up to five times hotter than our Sun. 

Stars are born from turbulent clouds of gas and dust that collapse under their own gravitational attraction. As the cloud collapses, a dense, hot core forms and begins gathering dust and gas, creating a protostar. This region in the image, that is home to a massive protostar, was observed by Hubble as part of a program examining jets of glowing gas blasted into space by massive protostars.

"These fast-moving jets, which form as gas collects around newly forming stars and last for only about 100,000 years, are known to play a role in star formation. Astronomers were interested to learn whether such jets influence the formation of massive stars similar to the way they affect the formation of lower-mass stars,” NASA said in its statement.

For creating this image, astronomers combined infrared observations from Hubble with those from radio telescopes in order to see inside these dusty star-forming regions. They found material with properties associated with young, low-mass stars which implied that the mechanism creating the light emitted by these jets is similar in young stars of different masses, up to ten times the mass of the Sun. This image followed a picture shared by Hubble, that featured a dark or absorption nebula named ‘LDN 1165’.

Don’t miss the absorption nebula

This particular image shared by Hubble is part of a collection called Lynds’ Catalog of Dark Nebulae, originally published in 1962. The LDN 1165 belongs to a class that are clouds of gas and dust that neither emit nor reflect light, instead blocking light coming from behind them. “These nebulae tend to contain large amounts of dust, which allows them to absorb visible light from stars or nebulae beyond them. Dark nebulae are so dark that they’ve been referred to as “holes in the sky,” but in reality they may be full of activity, with stars sometimes forming inside their dense clouds,” said NASA. 

Image: Twitter/@NASAHubble