Hubble Bubble

The Bubble Nebula is 7 light-years across – about one-and-a-half times the distance from our sun to its nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri – and resides 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.

The seething star forming this nebula is 45 times more massive than our sun. Gas on the star gets so hot that it escapes away into space as a "stellar wind" moving at over 4 million miles per hour. This outflow sweeps up the cold, interstellar gas in front of it, forming the outer edge of the bubble much like a snowplow piles up snow in front of it as it moves forward.

As the surface of the bubble's shell expands outward, it slams into dense regions of cold gas on one side of the bubble. Dense pillars of cool hydrogen gas laced with dust appear at the upper left of the picture.

This image is a close-up version of Hubble's 26th anniversary image

Image produced from raw data downloaded from MAST: the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes

Original image by ESA/Hubble, alignment, integration and colour mapping by Arc Fortnight.