Joseph DePasquale

Lagoon Nebula – Messier 8, 2018

Astrophotograph

Space Telescope Science Institute, Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland, United States

This colorful image, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, gives a breathtaking view of the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction. 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. This mayhem is all happening at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away and visible in binoculars simply as a smudge of light with a bright core. The clouds may look majestic and peaceful, but they are in a constant state of flux due to the surrounding torrent of searing radiation and high-speed particles from stellar winds. The Hubble view shows off the nebula’s 3D structure. Dust pushed away from the core reveals the glowing oxygen gas (blue) behind the blown-out cavity. The central star’s brilliant light illuminates the top of the cavity (yellow). The reddish hue that dominates part of the region is glowing nitrogen. The dark purple areas represent a mixture of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The image shows a region of the nebula measuring about 4 light-years across.