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This video pans over NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope observations of the Bubble Nebula, which were made to celebrate the 26th anniversary of Hubble in 2016. The delicate layers of the glowing nebula, the nearby interstellar cloud and the cometary knots surrounding the central star are all clearly visible.
Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)/Hubble; Music: Johan B. Monell
This video begins with a ground-based view of the night sky, before zooming in on the almost perfectly spherical Bubble Nebula as the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope sees it.
Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)/Hubble, Digitized Sky Survey 2, Nick Risinger
The Bubble Nebula, also known as NGC 7635, is an emission nebula located 8,000 light-years away. It is also referred to as Sharpless 162, or Caldwell 11. It is an H II region emission nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia. It lies close to the direction of the open cluster Messier 52. The "bubble" is created by the stellar wind from a massive hot, 8.7 magnitude young central star, SAO 20575 (BD+60°2522).
The nebula is near a giant molecular cloud which contains the expansion of the bubble nebula while itself being excited by the hot central star, causing it to glow. It was discovered in 1787 by William Herschel. This stunning new image was observed by the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope to celebrate its 26th year in space in 2016.
Credit: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), Hubble Heritage Team
Planetary Nebula: Misnamed but Not Misunderstood | NASA Chandra
Sometimes the names of objects are deeply misleading. For example, starfish are not actually fish. They are, in fact, echinoderms. And guinea pigs are not related to pigs in any way—they are rodents. Similarly, planetary nebulas have nothing to do with planets. They were misnamed when scientists looked through small telescopes in the 19th century and thought these objects looked like planets.
Today, astronomers know that a planetary nebula actually represents a phase that stars like our Sun experience when they use up much of their fuel. After the star cools and expands, it sheds its outer layers. The core of the star left behind at the center is a dense and smaller star called a white dwarf. The shells of gas linger around the white dwarf for a relatively short time in cosmic terms—tens of thousands of years—before dissipating into space. During that time, the white dwarf can illuminate and energize these jettisoned layers.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory contributes to the understanding of planetary nebulas by studying the hottest and most energetic processes still at work in these beautiful objects. X-ray data from Chandra reveal winds being driven away from the white dwarf at millions of miles per hour that create shock waves during collisions with slower-moving material previously ejected by the star. Chandra’s exceptional vision in X-rays contributes to the understanding of this brief, yet important, stage of stars’ lives.
This gallery contains half a dozen planetary nebulas that have been observed both by Chandra and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. While all six nebulas originated from similar physical conditions and evolved by similar processes, they currently appear somewhat different from others. The differences in the shapes and structures of these planetary nebulas may be due to the complexities of a slew of physical properties including how much of the star’s winds flow from its poles, whether the star wobbles as it spins, if the star has a companion or not, and other factors.
Sculpture Garden of Gas and Dust: Core of The Lagoon Nebula
This video zooms into the core of a rich star-birth region called the Lagoon Nebula, located in the constellation Sagittarius in the direction of our Milky Way galaxy’s central bulge. The sequence then dissolves to a series of imagined three-dimensional flights past striking structures of this gaseous landscape. Viewers examine dark, dusty clouds silhouetted against a colorful background of luminous gas that has been heated by a massive star. Pillars of dense gas and bow shocks around newborn stars are shaped by the strong winds from the brightest stars. The intense high-energy emission from these same stars creates the glowing ridges of gas in ionization fronts. These features are some of the highlights of this vibrant region where new stars and planets are born.
Credit: NASA, European Space Agency, and G. Bacon, D. Player, J. DePasquale, F. Summers, and Z. Levay/Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
Music: J. DePasquale
Acknowledgement: A. Fujii, Digitized Sky Survey, European Southern Observatory (ESO)/VPHAS, and R. Crisp
This image shows the Veil supernova remnant and the surrounding sky. Due to the size of the Nebula the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope was able to only observe a small part of it in detail.
Credit: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), Digitized Sky Survey 2
The Veil Nebula: Wide-field Ground-based Astrophoto
A wide-field image of the Veil Nebula, made as a color composite from individual exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The field of view is 4.2 x 4.4 degrees.
Distance:1,500 light years
Credit: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and the Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: J. Hester (Arizona State University) and Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble)
On Friday, July 22, 2022, at 10:39 a.m. PT, Falcon 9 launched 46 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
This was the fourth flight for the Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched NROL-87, NROL-87 and SARah-1.
Credit: Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX)
SpaceX Cargo Spacecraft Arrives at International Space Station | This Week @NASA
Week of July 22, 202: A commercial cargo spacecraft safely arrives at the space station, space station crewmembers conduct a spacewalk, and an update on plans to launch our Artemis I mission … a few of the stories to tell you about—This Week at NASA!
Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Hubblecast 07: The NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered magnificent sections of the Veil Nebula—the shattered remains of a supernova that exploded some 5-10,000 years ago. These Hubble images provide beautiful views of the delicate, wispy structure resulting from this cosmic explosion.
Credit: European Space Agency/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. L. Christensen)
Presented by: Dr Joe Liske (Dr J)
Narration: Dr. Robert Fosbury
Design: Martin Kornmesser
Web Technical Support: Lars Holm Nielsen, Raquel Yumi Shida
Cinematographer: Peter Rixner
Script: Lars Lindberg Christensen, Ana Margarida Lopes
This 3-D visualization flies across a small portion of the Veil Nebula as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. This region is a small part of a huge expanding remnant from a star that exploded many thousands of years ago. Hubble resolves tangled rope-like filaments of glowing gases. They have been shocked and heated by colliding with cooler, denser interstellar gas.
The 3-D model has been created for illustrative purposes and shows that the giant bubble of gas has a thin, rippled surface. It also highlights that the emission from different chemical elements arises from different layers of gas within the nebula. In the imagery, emission from sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen are shown in red, green, and blue, respectively.
Credit: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), and F. Summers, G. Bacon, Z. Levay, and L. Frattare (Viz 3D Team, Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
Acknowledgment: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
This video pans over NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope observations of the Veil Nebula. The features of the nebula, shown in different colors, are caused by the shockwave of the dying star and the interstellar gas it was surrounded by.
Credit: NASA, European Space Agency, Hubble Heritage Team
This video begins with a ground-based view of the night sky, before zooming in on the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant, as the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope sees it.
Credit: ESA/Hubble, Digitized Sky Survey, Nick Risinger
This object was featured in a previous Hubble photo release, but now new processing techniques have been applied, bringing out fine details of the nebula’s delicate threads and filaments of ionised gas. To create this colorful image, observations taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 instrument through 5 different filters were used. The new post-processing methods have further enhanced details of emissions from doubly ionized oxygen (seen here in blues), ionized hydrogen and ionized nitrogen (seen here in reds).
The Veil Nebula lies around 2,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus (The Swan), making it a relatively close neighbour in astronomical terms. Only a small portion of the nebula was captured in this image.
The Veil Nebula is the visible portion of the nearby Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant formed roughly 10,000 years ago by the death of a massive star. The Veil Nebula’s progenitor star—which was 20 times the mass of the Sun—lived fast and died young, ending its life in a cataclysmic release of energy. Despite this stellar violence, the shockwaves and debris from the supernova sculpted the Veil Nebula’s delicate tracery of ionized gas—creating a scene of surprising astronomical beauty.
Credit: European Space Agency/Hubble & NASA, Z. Levay
Tour: An Expanse of Light | NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory
The recent launches of the James Webb Space Telescope and the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, or "IXPE," by NASA and its international partners are excellent reminders that the universe emits light or energy in many different forms. To fully investigate cosmic objects and phenomena, scientists need telescopes that can detect light across what is known as the electromagnetic spectrum.
This gallery provides examples of the ways that different types of light from telescopes on the ground and in space can be combined. The common thread in each of these selections is data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, illustrating how X-rays—which are emitted by very hot and energetic processes—are found throughout the universe.
The collection contains objects ranging from a supernova remnant within our Galaxy to an enormous galaxy cluster millions of light years away. Each image contains X-rays from Chandra in combination with data from other telescopes that capture different types of light. The objects are the binary system R Aquarii, the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, the "Guitar Nebula" and its pulsar, the galaxy cluster Abell 2597, and the NGC 4490 galaxy.
In the coming weeks and months, we will hear much more about JWST and IXPE. It will be exciting to see what discoveries they make when their data are joined those other telescopes, including Chandra, in exploring our Universe.
Bob & Jessica in Cupola Monitor Dragon Docking | International Space Station
NASA astronauts Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins are pictured inside the cupola, the International Space Station's "window to the world," after monitoring the successful rendezvous and docking of the SpaceX Dragon space freighter on its 25th Commercial Resupply Services mission. While the International Space Station was traveling more than 267 miles over the South Atlantic Ocean, the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft autonomously docked to the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module at 11:21 a.m. EDT, July 16, 2022.
Expedition 67 Crew
Commander Oleg Artemyev (Russia)
Roscosmos Flight Engineers: Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov (Russia)
NASA Flight Engineers: Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, Jessica Watkins (USA)
European Space Agency (ESA) Flight Engineer: Samantha Cristoforetti (Italy)
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
