Hubble's Close-Up of the Heart of the Lagoon Nebula

In an image released on September 22, 2010, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys looked into the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, also known as Messier 8. The picture shows a vast cloud of glowing gas and dust, shaped by intense radiation from hot young stars — a dramatic scene behind a peaceful name.

Why "Lagoon"

The nebula is named for a broad, lagoon-shaped lane of dust that crosses its glowing gas. That lane stands out in wide-field images but is outside this close-up. Even so, the billowing forms and sandy textures in Hubble's view make the watery name fit here too.

A nursery of stars

The Lagoon Nebula lies four to five thousand light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius (the Archer). It is a huge star-forming region, stretching across one hundred light-years. Inside it, clouds of hydrogen are slowly collapsing into new stars, and the stars' strong ultraviolet light makes the surrounding gas glow a distinctive red.

The wisps and beach-like forms are not the work of tides. Ultraviolet radiation wears away the gas and dust and scatters it into these shapes.

Proof of stars still forming

Astronomers studying the nebula in the years before this image found the first unambiguous evidence that stars here are still growing by drawing in matter from the surrounding cloud. Young stars still wrapped in an accretion disc sometimes fire long streams of material from their poles. Several of these jets, called Herbig-Haro objects, were found in the nebula in the five years before the image was released, strongly supporting astronomers' ideas about how stars form in hydrogen-rich regions like this one.

Seeing it yourself

On a dark night the Lagoon Nebula can just be seen without a telescope, as a small gray patch in the heart of the Milky Way. To the naked eye it looks unremarkable, because human eyes cannot tell colors apart well in dim light. The 18th-century French astronomer Charles Messier observed it and listed it in his famous catalogue, the source of its other name. His small refracting telescope would have shown only a hint of the structure and color Hubble reveals.

Hubble is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

Sources

Based on "Hubble reveals heart of Lagoon Nebula," NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Image and Video Library; a work of the United States government in the public domain, in hubnx's own words. Image: NASA, ESA.