NASA images: 5 stunning photos by Hubble telescope catch glimpses of outer Space, from protostar to globular cluster | Mint

The outer space world is home to endless mysteries and secrets waiting to be discovered. High definition telescopes and satellites closely observe outer space objects and events to develop better understanding of humans. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Hubble telescope is one of the most versatile and large space telescope renowned for its vital research capability. 

Here are top five images by NASA Hubble space telescope:

This light-year-long knot of interstellar gas and dust that looks a little like a caterpillar is a newborn star – a protostar.

Stars form in large clouds of gas and dust called molecular clouds. These massive clouds are cold and clump up. Eventually, gravity causes some of these clumps to collapse. When this happens, friction causes the material to heat up, eventually leading to the creation of a protostar.

A protostar hasn’t yet developed the energy-generating capabilities of a star like the Sun, which fuses hydrogen into helium in its core. Instead, a protostar’s energy comes from the heat released created by that initial collapse. In time, the protostar will develop the ability to generate energy like other Sun-like stars.

In the frigid waters of Foxe Basin near Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, chunks of sea ice drift through swirls of grease ice, creating patterns that remind us of the clouds of gas and dust we see throughout the universe.

Sea ice often starts out as grease ice, a soupy layer of tiny ice crystals on the ocean’s surface. While there’s no oil involved, grease ice makes the ocean look slick. As the temperature drops, grease ice thickens and merges into slabs of more solid ice.

Changing ice, ocean, and atmospheric conditions in the northernmost part of Earth have a large impact on the entire planet because the Arctic region acts like Earth’s air conditioner. Much of the Sun’s energy is transported from tropical regions of our planet by winds and weather systems into the Arctic where it is then lost to space. This process helps cool the planet.

This tangled planetary nebula is the final stage of a medium-sized star like our Sun—billions and billions of years from now. While consuming the last of the fuel in its core, the dying star pushes out a large part of its outer layer, creating the twisted filaments you see here.

Don’t let their name get you mixed up: planetary nebulae don’t actually have anything to do with planets. When early astronomers first looked at them through telescopes, they appeared large and indistinct, like some planets did—and the name stuck.

This glittery field is a 10-billion-year-old globular cluster, NGC 6496, and the stars within it are quite special. Not only do they have high metallicity, but some of them are also variable stars. This means that their brightness varies over time.

NGC 6496 hosts some long-period variables – giant pulsating stars whose brightness can take up to, and even over, a thousand days to change – and short-period eclipsing binaries, which dim when eclipsed by a stellar companion.

The way these stars’ brightness changes can reveal a lot about their mass, radius, luminosity, temperature, composition, and evolution, providing astronomers with measurements that would be difficult or even impossible to obtain through other methods.

Four billion light-years away, inside an immense collection of nearly 500 galaxies nicknamed “Pandora’s Cluster,” NASA Hubble found the faint, ghostly light of wandering stars.

These stars are no longer bound to any one galaxy, and drift freely between galaxies in the cluster. By observing the light from the orphaned stars, Hubble astronomers assembled evidence that suggests as many as six galaxies were torn to pieces inside the cluster over a stretch of 6 billion years.

Scientists have long hypothesized that the light from scattered stars should be detectable after galaxies are disassembled, but the predicted glow of stars is very faint and a challenge to identify. However, these extremely faint stars are brightest at near-infrared wavelengths of light, which Hubble can detect. Learning more about this “ghost light” is an important step in understanding the evolution of galaxy clusters.