Hubble Peers At Peculiar Galactic Pair By NASA Hubble Space Telescope

The Blinking Planetary Nebula, NGC 6826 // Dionysus

Second Starship launch

Nebulae are awesome

The Omega Nebula © chucksastropho1

Hubble Watches Star Clusters on a Collision Course by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Solar Dynamics Observatory Satellite Saw a Lunar Transit by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Chandra Sees the Peacock’s Galaxy ©

Wolf-Rayet Bubble in Cygnus © Yannick Akar

M83, Galaxy of One Thousand Rubies

Amazing

Though a doomed star exploded some 20,000 years ago, its tattered remnants continue racing into space at breakneck speeds—and the Hubble Space Telescope has caught the action.

The nebula, called the Cygnus Loop, forms a bubble-like shape that is about 120 light-years in diameter. The distance to its center is approximately 2,600 light-years. The entire nebula has a width of six full Moons as seen on the sky.

"Hubble is the only way that we can actually watch what's happening at the edge of the bubble with such clarity," said Ravi Sankrit, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

"The Hubble images are spectacular when you look at them in detail. They're telling us about the density differences encountered by the supernova shocks as they propagate through space, and the turbulence in the regions behind these shocks."

The Cygnus Loop was discovered in 1784 by William Herschel, using a simple 18-inch reflecting telescope. He could have never imagined that a little over two centuries later we'd have a telescope powerful enough to zoom in on a very tiny slice of the nebula for this spectacular view.

Credit: Video - NASA, ESA, STScI; Acknowledgment - NSF's NOIRLab, Akira Fujii, Jeff Hester, Davide De Martin, Travis A. Rector, Ravi Sankrit (STScI), DSS.