NASA never misses a chance to amaze people around the world. This time, NASA shared a beautiful image of the Lagoon Nebula.
Originally captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, this colorful image of Lagoon Nebula is a window to the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction.
The center of the image comprises a massive star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun. The star called Herschel 36 is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust.
Located 4,000 light-years away, the lagoon nebula is a vast stellar nursery. It is visible in binoculars simply as a smudge of light with a bright core.
Herschel 36 is still very active because it is young by a star’s standards, only 1 million years old. Based on its mass, it will live for another 5 million years.
The Hubble view shows off the bubble’s 3D structure. Dust pushed away from the star reveals the glowing oxygen gas (in blue) behind the blown-out cavity. Herschel 36’s brilliant light is illuminating the top of the cavity (in yellow). The reddish hue that dominates part of the region is glowing nitrogen. The dark purple areas represent a mixture of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.
The image shows a region of the nebula measuring about 4 light-years across.