NASA have shared mesmerising images of five ghostly blue clumps of light which are believed to be evidence of the birth of a new star.
Clare Danes, eat your heart out. This is apparently what the birth of a star really looks like.
New stars blast colossal amounts of energy-rich matter known as plasma into the cosmos, and the Hubble Space Telescope captured the moment these vivid bright clumps moving through the cosmos some 1,000 light years from Earth.
The blue clusters in the picture are the Herbig–Haro objects numbered 7 to 11 (HH 7–11), and they’re located within NGC 1333, a reflection nebula full of dust and gas found roughly 1,000 light-years away from our planet.
NASA doesn’t identify the new star itself, called SVS 13, perhaps because it’s obscured by thick clouds of cosmic matter.
This collection of dust and gas is part of a distant nebula, which are often the remnants of exploded stars swirling through the infinity of space.
As NASA says, these blue masses are transient creations in the cosmos, as ‘they disappear into nothingness within a few tens of thousands of years’.
Hubble was also recently able to capture a photograph of an enormous blue star nicknamed Icarus, the farthest individual star from Earth ever seen.
A press release said it would normally be much too faint to view:
But through a quirk of nature that tremendously amplifies the star’s feeble glow, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope were able to pinpoint this faraway star and set a new distance record.
They also used Icarus to test one theory of dark matter, and to probe the make-up of a foreground galaxy cluster.
The star, harboured in a very distant spiral galaxy, is so far away that its light has taken 9 billion years to reach Earth.
It appears to us on Earth as it did in April 2018 when the universe was about 30 percent of its current age.
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A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.