eLifespaces

Twenty years ago, the space shuttle Discovery (the STS-31 mission) roared into orbit April 24, 1990, with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a devise that would memorize and ignite our imagination for years to come. Celebrating this milestone, NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) are releasing stunning new pictures…

These Hubble photos are of a small portion of one of the largest known star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Three light-year-tall towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The scene is reminiscent of Hubble’s classic “Pillars of Creation” photo taken five years into its mission.

Newborn stars are emerging as dense, compact pockets of interstellar gas called evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs). Hubble found the "EGGs," appropriately enough, in the Eagle nebula, a nearby star-forming region 7,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens.


These striking pictures resolve the EGGs at the tip of finger-like features protruding from monstrous columns of cold gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula (also called M16). The columns — dubbed "elephant trunks" — protrude from the wall of a vast cloud of molecular hydrogen, like stalagmites rising above the floor of a cavern. Inside the gaseous towers, which are light-years long, the interstellar gas is dense enough to collapse under its own weight, forming young stars that continue to grow as they accumulate more and more mass from their surroundings.

Hubble will not be around much longer. Until then, we will continue to be amazed by the images sent back to us on Earth. To learn more, visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html