In honor of the Hubble Space Telescope‘s 28th anniversary, NASA has gifted all of us with stunning new images of the Lagoon Nebula. These photos serve as the latest reminders there is nothing more beautiful in the universe than the universe itself.
These latest gorgeous photos, which we first saw at Gizmodo, are Hubble’s look at the “rich star-birth region called the Lagoon Nebula, located in the constellation Sagittarius in the direction of our Milky Way galaxy’s central bulge,” which is around 4,000 light years away from Earth. This first image is the visible-light view, and its cotton candy-like colors create a photo that stands among Hubble’s best.
“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.”
But if you prefer to see stars to colors, the infrared-light view image of it is in line with a more traditional idea of what space looks like. And by traditional we mean something that is totally incredible and will blow you away.
“This star-filled image…reveals a very different view of the Lagoon Nebula compared to its visible-light portrait. Making infrared observations of the cosmos allows astronomers to penetrate vast clouds of gas and dust to uncover hidden gems.”
But that’s not all, because NASA also released a very trippy video that lets us fly through it ourselves.
What’s even more exciting though is that NASA says these images give us “a sneak peek at the dramatic vistas NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will provide” when it launches in 2020. Which means we’ll have even more anniversaries to celebrate the beauty of the cosmos.
What’s your all-time favorite Hubble image? Share it with us in the comments below.
Images: NASA
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