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Hubble Marks 36 Years With New Trifid Nebula Image Showing Change

Upgraded instruments let Hubble track visible change in a star-forming cloud.

An image collage containing 3 images, Image 1 shows The Trifid Nebula, a glowing blend of blue and orange gas with dark lanes, seen in space with stars, Image 2 shows Hubble Space Telescope in Earth's orbit, Image 3 shows A cosmic sight of the Trifid Nebula, with a dark, slug-shaped nebulous column surrounded by glowing red and blue gases, and scattered stars
NASA celebrates Hubble’s 36th anniversary with a new image of the Trifid Nebula, a star-forming region it first captured in 1997. The telescope leveraged almost its full operational lifetime to show us changes in the nebula on human time scales with an improved camera. NASA, ESA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Overview

  • NASA released a fresh Hubble portrait of the Trifid Nebula to mark the telescope’s 36th year in orbit.
  • The image shows a stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years away in Sagittarius where massive stars have blown a bubble that sparks new star birth.
  • A structure nicknamed the Cosmic Sea Slug and a jet called Herbig–Haro 399 reveal how young stars carve and light nearby gas and dust.
  • Hubble’s wide-field, high-sensitivity camera installed in 2009 enabled a sharper revisit that makes changes since the 1997 view easier to measure.
  • Coverage cites roughly 1.7 million observations across about 55,000 targets and more than 22,000 papers as a marker of Hubble’s scientific impact.