But in the case of SAO 20575, its powerful stellar winds are blasting through the molecular cloud, pushing against the surrounding cloud, producing the bright bubbly appearance. But this time, the science team knit together four images from the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 to show off the bubble in its entirety. Scientists also unveiled a spectacular video of the Bubble Nebula as seen by Hubble.
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The folks at the Hubble Space Telescope have released magnificent images of a “gigantic cosmic soap bubble” to celebrate Hubble’s 26th anniversary in space.
Today’s image is not the first time the Bubble Nebula has caught Hubble’s eye, however, due to its very large size on the sky, previous Hubble images have only shown small sections of the nebula, providing a much less spectacular overall effect.
The Hubble Telescope has now been in orbit around the Earth for 26 years. Well, we say at the centre, but SAO 20575, which is 10-20 the mass of our Sun, is actually to the left of centre. The nebula was first discovered in 1787 by famed astronomer William Herschel, and scientists have used Hubble to photograph the object in the past. However, the pressure continues to increase and subsequently forces the bubble to grow – now at more than 100,000 kilometres per hour. The bubble is 7 light-years across – about one-and-a-half times the distance from our sun to its nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. It is being formed by a proto-typical Wolf-Rayet star, BD +60º2522, an extremely bright, massive, and short-lived star that has lost most of its outer hydrogen and is now fusing helium into heavier elements.
The star that’s shooting the solar wind at the bubble isn’t located at the center (you can see it glowing in gold at the top), so astronomers are trying to figure out how the bubble is so perfectly spherical.
In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit. The star also illuminates the complex system of cometary knots – crescent-shaped blobs of dust – seen just to the right of the star in the image.
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Astronomers should be especially delighted, because the highly detailed mosaic image will let them study the bubble in all its glory.
