"Hubble Science"
"Starbirth Nebulae: Cosmic Cradles"
These beautiful colorful images that everyone loves from Hubble, the nebulae.
I love them, they're colorful, they're beautiful, but they're signposts of star formation.
The reason these gas clouds are so colorful is that there are massive stars, bigger than our sun, that
have recently formed, recently in a cosmic sense. But perhaps within the last million years or so
these stars have coalesced, and their radiation is so powerful that it goes out and ionizes the
surrounding gas which creates these beautiful colors. So astronomers see these colorful nebulae,
such that Hubble reveals in great detail, and we say oh that's beautiful, but we also say,
Aha! That's a sign that star formation is still active in this region. We can hone in with Hubble
and other telescopes and see exactly what's going on in the continuation of star formation in these
regions. We didn't really realize, when Hubble was launched, that we could see such details
about the dynamics of continuing star formation; and that's something that now people love Hubble
for are these beautiful images of activity in our galaxy and in other galaxies as well.
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