See a close-up of the stunning Lagoon Nebula in this Hubble image

The image of the week shared this week by researchers working with the Hubble Space Telescope is truly stunning, showing open cluster NGC 6530. Shrouded in dust, this cluster of thousands of stars is a small part of the huge and beautiful lake. nebula.

Located 4,350 light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius, the cluster’s distinctive smoky shapes are formed from a cloud of interstellar dust and gas that fuels the formation of new stars.

To investigate this scene, Hubble used two of its instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Hubble scientists Type that astronomers “scoured the region hoping to find new examples of Proplyds, a special class of luminous protoplanetary disks surrounding nascent stars. The vast majority of the elements were found in one region, close to the Orion Nebula. This makes it difficult to understand their origin and age in other astronomical environments.

This image combines data from the Advanced Survey Camera with data from a ground-based instrument, OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope located in Chile.

Hubble previously imaged the Lagoon Nebula in one of its most famous images, which was shared to celebrate the telescope’s 28th anniversary. this picture It also showed only a portion of the entire nebula, which is 55 light-years wide and 20 light-years high.

The nebula is also known as Messier 8, but was named the Lagoon Nebula because of the wide, lake-like dust lane in deep field images. Up close, you can see more detail in the dust structures that are being blown and sculpted by stellar winds into and between the dust, formed as new stars form.

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