Hauntingly beautiful Hubble telescope images show stellar nurseries exploding in nascent stars — Space Photo of the Week

A placid cloud of gas and dust may not sound like much to get excited about, but it’s where one of the most fundamental phenomena in astronomy takes place: star formation.

This is star-forming region Lupus 3, a nebula where bright, hot stars are born from a dense molecular cloud. Our own star, the Sun, likely formed in a region exactly like our star more than 4 billion years ago.

Look closely at this hauntingly beautiful image of Lupus 3 captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Calm yet energetic, bluish fingers of gas and dust curl toward the dark dust cloud in the lower left corner. These fingers are where certain types of young stars are born, but they are found throughout the image, primarily in the center left, bottom right, and top center. These stars, called T Tauri stars, are young, less than 10 million years old, making them cosmologically equivalent to newborn babies, and they exhibit dramatic changes in brightness as they grow and evolve.

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The Taurus star is special. They are rarely found in the Milky Way and excites astronomers because they represent the early stages of a star’s life, when it continues to contract under the force of gravity.

They also gradually begin the fusion process that defines them as stars. But turbulence in the environment, from strong stellar winds to material falling onto the star, causes fluctuations in the light that reaches Hubble’s 7.8-foot (2.4-meter) mirror and Wide-Field Camera 3. T Tauri stars often emit large-scale flares and brightness changes over long periods of time, as giant “sunspots” on their surfaces fade in and out of view.

Most of Lupus 3 is dark, and starlight from the star T Tauri illuminates parts of the molecular cloud, creating a blue reflection nebula called GN 16.05.2, or Barnes 149. By observing at multiple wavelengths of light, Hubble can penetrate the hidden dust and see what’s going on inside molecular cloud complexes like the iconic Orion, Ophiuchus, and Taurus constellations, as well as Lupus 3. Eagle Nebula (M16).

Images like these have helped astronomers glimpse processes invisible to ground-based telescopes, allowing them to refine models of how stars and planetary systems arise.

For more sublime space images, check out this week’s space photo archive.