The Hubble Space Telescope has been in orbit for 23 years and, to celebrate this milestone, the space telescope revisited the famous Horsehead Nebula in the constellation of Orion.
But on this particular observing session, Hubble had a little help from another space telescope friend.
We may be familiar with the majestic pillar of dust and gas, but this view was imaged using Hubble's high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3, which views the universe in near-infrared wavelengths. See the comparison of Hubble's infrared view and the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) optical view of the nebula below:
Usually, the thick dust obscures the baby stars forming inside the Horsehead's distinctive pillar, but Hubble's infrared imaging allows the hot stars cocooned inside to be seen. Also, the nebula's outermost 'edge' appears to glow as it is illuminated by a nearby hot star.
In addition to Hubble's view, sibling space telescope, the European Herschel space observatory, imaged the region surrounding the Horsehead Nebula in an even more extreme wavelength: far-infrared. The Herschel observation not only picks out violent regions of starbirth in the Orion B molecular cloud region, it also provides a context to the scale of the Horsehead feature jutting out.
Images courtesy of NASA/ESA
By Ian O'Neill for Discovery News
