Hubble Heritage Project’s First Anniversary

Herbig Haro 32: Jets of Material Ejected From a Young Star

HH 32 is an excellent example of a "Herbig-Haro object," which is formed when young stars eject jets of material back into interstellar space. This object, about 1,000 light-years from Earth, is somewhat older than Hubble's variable nebula, and the wind from the bright central...

Hubble Heritage Project's First Anniversary

To mark the first anniversary of the Hubble Heritage Project, we present four NASA Hubble Space Telescope images of nebulae surrounding stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. Two of these Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 images (Herbig Haro 32 and Hubble's Variable Nebula) show...

Hubble's Variable Nebula (NGC 2261)

Hubble's variable nebula is named (like the Hubble telescope itself) after the American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who carried out some of the early studies of this object. It is a fan-shaped cloud of gas and dust which is illuminated by R Monocerotis (R Mon), the bright star...

NGC 2346

NGC 2346, in contrast to the first two young objects, is a so-called "planetary nebula," which is ejected from Sun-like stars which are near the ends of their lives. NGC 2346 is remarkable because its central star is known to be actually a very close pair of stars, orbiting each...

NGC 2440

NGC 2440 is another planetary nebula ejected by a dying star, but it has a much more chaotic structure than NGC 2346. The central star of NGC 2440 is one of the hottest known, with a surface temperature near 200,000 degrees Celsius. The complex structure of the surrounding...