NGC 1333

Hubble celebrates its 33rd anniversary with NGC 1333 (heic2304a).jpg
(c) ESA/Hubble, CC BY 4.0
Astronomers are celebrating the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s 33rd launch anniversary with an ethereal photo of a nearby star-forming region, NGC 1333. The nebula is in the Perseus molecular cloud, and is located approximately 960 light-years away.Hubble’s colourful view, showcasing its unique capability to obtain images in light from ultraviolet to near-infrared, unveils an effervescent cauldron of glowing gases and pitch-black dust stirred up and blown around by several hundred newly forming stars embedded within the dark cloud. Even then, Hubble just scratches the surface; most of the star-birthing firestorm is hidden behind clouds of fine dust — essentially soot — that are thicker toward the bottom of the image. The black areas of the image are not empty space, but are filled with obscuring dust.To capture this image, Hubble peered through a veil of dust on the edge of a giant cloud of cold molecular hydrogen — the raw material for fabricating new stars and planets under the relentless pull of gravity. The image underscores the fact that star formation is a messy process in a rambunctious Universe.Ferocious stellar winds, likely from the bright blue star at the top of the image, are blowing through a curtain of dust. The fine dust scatters the starlight at blue wavelengths.Farther down, another bright super-hot star shines through filaments of obscuring dust, looking like the Sun shining through scattered clouds. A diagonal string of fainter accompanying stars looks reddish because the dust is filtering their starlight, allowing more of the red light to get through.The bottom of the picture presents a keyhole peek deep into the dark nebula. Hubble captures the reddish glow of ionised hydrogen. It looks like the finale of a fireworks display, with several overlapping events. This is caused by pencil-thin jets shooting out from newly forming stars outside the frame of view. These stars are surrounded by circumstellar discs, which may eventually produce planetary systems, and powerful magnetic fields that direct two parallel beams of hot gas deep into space, like a double lightsaber from science fiction films. They sculpt patterns on the hydrogen cocoon, like laser lightshow tracings. The jets are a star’s birth announcement.This view offers an example of the time when our own Sun and planets formed inside such a dusty molecular cloud, 4.6 billion years ago. Our Sun didn’t form in isolation but was instead embedded inside a mosh pit of frantic stellar birth, perhaps even more energetic and massive than NGC 1333.[Image description: A vertical image with colors ranging from blue at the top to golden in the middle and red at the bottom. At the top, a bright blue star is illuminating surrounding clouds of gas. At the center of the image, a brighter yellow star illuminates surrounding gas. The bottom of the image is noticeably darker than the rest, with the exception of a dramatic splash of red.]

NGC1333-AAE (cropped).jpg
Autor/Urheber: Alpratsibz, Lizenz: CC BY-SA 4.0
This image of NGC 1333 was produced by the Agrupació Astronòmica d'Eivissa (AAE) using 303 photographies taken by the Cala d'Hort Telescope (TCH) in Ibiza island, Spain

N1333s.jpg
Autor/Urheber: Credit Line and Copyright Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona, Lizenz: CC BY-SA 3.0 us
NGC 1333

Picture Details:

   Optics            24-inch RC Optical Systems Telescope
   Camera            SBIG STL11000 CCD Camera
   Filters           Custom Scientific
   Dates             November 15th and 16th 2009
   Location          Mount Lemmon SkyCenter
   Exposure          LRGB = 360:100:90:90 minutes
   Acquisition       ACP Observatory Control Software (DC-3 Dreams),TheSky (Software Bisque), Maxim DL/CCD (Cyanogen)
   Processing        CCDStack (CCDWare), Mira (MiraMetrics), Maxim DL (Cyanogen), Photoshop CS3 (Adobe)

Credit Line and Copyright Adam Block and Sid Leach/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

Ngc1333.jpg
Dusty NGC 1333 is seen as a reflection nebula in visible light images, sporting bluish hues characteristic of starlight reflected by dust. But at longer infrared wavelengths, the interstellar dust itself glows - shown in red in this false-color Spitzer Space Telescope image. The penetrating infrared view also shows youthful stars that would otherwise still be obscured by the dusty clouds which formed them. Notably, greenish streaks and splotches that seem to litter the region trace the glow of cosmic jets blasting away from emerging young stellar objects as the jets plow into the cold cloud material. In all, the chaotic scene likely resembles one in which our own Sun formed over 4.5 billion years ago. NGC 1333 is a mere 1,000 light-years distant in the constellation Perseus.

The smoking gun of a newborn star.jpg
(c) ESA/Hubble, CC BY 4.0
In this image the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the smoking gun of a newborn star, the Herbig–Haro objects numbered 7 to 11 (HH 7–11). These five objects, visible in blue in the top centre of the image, lie within NGC 1333, a reflection nebula full of gas and dust found about a thousand light-years away from Earth.

Herbig-Haro objects like HH 7–11 are transient phenomena. Travelling away from the star that created them, at a speed of up to 250,000 kilometres per hour they disappear into nothingness within a few tens of thousands of years. The young star that is the source of HH 7–11 is called SVS 13 and all five objects are moving away from SVS 13 toward the upper left. The current distance between HH 7 and SVS 13 is about 20,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Herbig–Haro objects are formed when jets of ionised gas ejected by a young star collide with nearby clouds of gas and dust at high speeds. The Herbig–Haro objects visible in this image are no exception to this and were formed when the jets from the newborn star SVS 13 collided with the surrounding clouds. These collisions created the five brilliant clumps of light within the reflection nebula.