This image from the Hubble Space Telescope is beyond beautiful. Hubble reminds us again that our universe is amazing, mind-boggling, and precious.
What you are seeing is a nebula some 4,900 light years distant from Earth, in the constellation Gemini. Its name is AFGL 5180 and it is part of a vast complex of molecular clouds called Gem OB1. These thick molecular clouds are where stars are born, and AFLG 5180 is no exception.
As you can see from the historic telescope image, it is spectacularly illuminated from deep within by a very young and hot star that violently disrupts the space around it as it grows larger, opening vast cavities in the gas cloud.
Also known as IRAS 06058 + 2138 and GAL 188.95 + 00.89, “in the center of the image, a massive star is forming and exploding cavities through the clouds with a pair of powerful jets, spreading to the upper right and lower left of the image. The light from this star escapes and reaches us for the most part by illuminating these cavities, like a lighthouse passing through storm clouds, “explain the Hubble astronomers.
“Stars are born in dusty environments and, although this dust generates spectacular images, it can prevent astronomers from seeing stars embedded in it,” they clarify.
The color image was obtained from separate exposures taken in the near-infrared region of the spectrum with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Four filters were used to sample various wavelengths . “The WFC3 instrument is designed to capture detailed images in visible and infrared light, which means that young stars hidden in vast star-forming regions like AFGL 5180 can be seen much more clearly,” the astronomers comment.
