See what space looked like on your birthday, in honor of Hubble Telescope turning 30

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See what space looked like on your birthday, in honor of Hubble Telescope turning 30


See what space looked like on your birthday, in honor of Hubble Telescope turning 30

This story originally appeared on travelandleisure.com.

The Hubble telescope is celebrating a milestone birthday this month, but, rather than celebrate alone, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are making this celebration all about you.On April 24, 1990, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, where it has recorded some of the most stunning images of the planets and stars around us, inspiring us all to dream a little bigger.

“Hubble’s seemingly never-ending, breathtaking celestial snapshots provide a visual shorthand for its exemplary scientific achievements,” NASA and the ESA explained in a blog post about the telescope’s birthday. “Unlike any other telescope before it, Hubble has made astronomy relevant, engaging, and accessible for people of all ages. The mission has yielded to date 1.4 million observations and provided data that astronomers around the world have used to write more than 17,000 peer-reviewed scientific publications, making it one of the most prolific space observatories in history. Its rich data archive alone will fuel future astronomy research for generations to come.”

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#Hubble30 A colorful image resembling a cosmic version of an undersea world teeming with stars is being released to commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 30 years of viewing the wonders of space. In the Hubble portrait, the giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 163,000 light-years away. The image is nicknamed the “Cosmic Reef,” because NGC 2014 resembles part of a coral reef floating in a vast sea of stars. Some of the stars in NGC 2014 are monsters. The nebula’s sparkling centerpiece is a grouping of bright, hefty stars, each 10 to 20 times more massive than our Sun. The seemingly isolated blue nebula at lower left (NGC 2020) has been created by a solitary mammoth star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun. The blue gas was ejected by the star through a series of eruptive events during which it lost part of its outer envelope of material. For more information, follow the link in our bio. Credits: NASA, ESA & STScI

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This year, to mark its 30th anniversary in space, Hubble is celebrating with a portrait of two nebulae that reveal “how energetic, massive stars sculpt their homes of gas and dust.”

The image shows NGC 2014 and NGC 2020, a fiery orange and red nebulae and deep blue nebulae respectively, that appear to be sitting side-by-side. However, as NASA and ESA explained, they are actually part of one giant star formation complex.

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#Hubble30 (2018) This colorful Hubble image gives us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction. At the center of the photo, a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust. This mayhem is all happening at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away and visible in binoculars simply as a smudge of light with a bright core. The giant star, called Herschel 36, is bursting out of its natal cocoon of material, unleashing blistering radiation and torrential stellar winds (streams of subatomic particles) that push dust away in curtain-like sheets. This action resembles the Sun bursting through the clouds at the end of an afternoon thunderstorm that showers sheets of rainfall. For more information, follow the link in our bio. Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI

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“The star-forming regions seen here are dominated by the glow of stars at least 10 times more massive than our Sun,” the space agencies said. “These stars have short lives of only a few million years, compared to the 10-billion-year lifetime of our Sun.”

Truly, both NASA and ESA understand just how inspiring and magnificent images like this really are.

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#Hubble30 (2016) The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of an enormous bubble being blown into space by a super-hot, massive star. The Bubble Nebula, or NGC 7635, is 7 light-years across — about one-and-a-half times the distance from our Sun to its nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. The seething star forming this nebula is 45 times more massive than our Sun. Gas on the star gets so hot that it escapes away into space as a “stellar wind” moving at over 4 million miles per hour. This outflow sweeps up the cold, interstellar gas in front of it, forming the outer edge of the bubble much like a snowplow piles up snow in front of it as it moves forward. As the surface of the bubble’s shell expands outward, it slams into dense regions of cold gas on one side of the bubble. This asymmetry makes the star appear dramatically off-center from the bubble, with its location in the 10 o’clock position in the Hubble view. Dense pillars of cool hydrogen gas laced with dust appear at the upper left of the picture, and more “fingers” can be seen nearly face-on, behind the translucent bubble. This Hubble image of the Bubble Nebula was chosen to mark the 26th anniversary of the launch of Hubble into orbit on April 24, 1990. For more information please follow the link in our bio. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

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“The Hubble Space Telescope has shaped the imagination of truly a whole generation, inspiring not only scientists but almost everybody,” Günther Hasinger, Director of Science for the European Space Agency, said in a statement. “It is paramount for the excellent and long-lasting cooperation between NASA and ESA.”

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#Hubble30 (2011) The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the interacting galaxy pair Arp 273, popularly called the “Rose.” The larger of the spiral galaxies, known to astronomers as UGC 1810, has a disk that is distorted into a blossom-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy UGC 1813 (the Rose’s “stem”) below it. A swath of blue jewels across the top of UGC 1810 is the combined light from clusters of intensely bright and hot, young, blue stars. The galaxy’s outer arm — appearing as a partial ring — suggests that the smaller companion galaxy actually dived deep, but off-center, through UGC 1810. The “stem” galaxy, UGC 1813, is oriented nearly edge-on to Earth and shows distinct signs of intense star formation at its nucleus, perhaps triggered by the encounter with UGC 1810. This image was taken in celebration of Hubble’s 21st anniversary in 2011. For more information, follow the link in our bio. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

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So, how does this all involve you? To honor the momentous anniversary, both agencies created a tool so you can see what Hubble saw on your birthday.

All you need to do is head to the dedicated website and enter your birthdate. It will then show you the gorgeous intergalactic view that Hubble captured on your special day.

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#Hubble30 (2010) This Hubble Space Telescope image captures the chaotic activity atop a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks. This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. Scorching radiation and fast winds (streams of charged particles) from super-hot newborn stars in the nebula are shaping and compressing the pillar, causing new stars to form within it. Streamers of hot ionized gas can be seen flowing off the ridges of the structure, and wispy veils of gas and dust, illuminated by starlight, float around its towering peaks. The denser parts of the pillar are resisting being eroded by radiation much like a towering butte in Utah’s Monument Valley withstands erosion by water and wind. Nestled inside this dense mountain are fledgling stars. Long streamers of gas can be seen shooting in opposite directions off the pedestal at the top of the image. A second pair of jets is visible at another peak near the center of the image. These jets (known as HH 901 and HH 902) are the signposts for new star birth. The jets are launched by swirling disks around the young stars, which allow material to slowly accrete onto the stars’ surfaces. For more information, follow the link in our bio. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

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Want even more fun? NASA is inviting everyone to make a birthday cake (either traditional baking or out of arts and crafts materials) and share it on social media using the hashtags #Hubble30BDayCake and #Hubble30. If nothing else, it’s a great home learning experience for children in quarantine or just another excellent excuse to eat cake while starring at the stars tonight.

The post See what space looked like on your birthday, in honor of Hubble Telescope turning 30 appeared first on HelloGiggles.

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