Hubble Space Telescope Captures Lagoon Nebula In Extreme Detail

The team working with the legendary Hubble Space Telescope shared a stunning image of the cluster NGC 6530. It is a cluster of thousands of stars covered in dust and part of the massive and magnificent Lagoon Nebula.

The nebula is 4350 light-years away from our planet in the constellation of Sagittarius. The cluster has a smoke-like shape, formed due to interstellar dust and gas, which drives star formation in the region.

Hubble Uses Advanced Tech To Capture The Image

The legendary space telescope leveraged two advanced instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, to observe the nebula.

Hubble’s team wrote that scientists “scoured the region in the hope of finding new examples of proplyds, a particular class of illuminated protoplanetary discs surrounding newborn stars. The vast majority of proplyds have been found in only one region, the nearby Orion Nebula. This makes understanding their origin and lifetimes in other astronomical environments challenging.”

The image was created using data from the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the data from the OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope in Chile.

Diving Deep Into Lagoon Nebula

It isn’t the first time Hubble captured the Lagoon Nebula. Previously, the space telescope shared the celestial body’s image on its 28th anniversary. That image showcased a small part of the entire nebula, which spans 55-light years wide and is 20 light-years tall.

The nebula is also referred to as Messier 8. But it is called the Lagoon Nebula due to its dust lane, which appears like a lagoon in deep fields.

Ghostly Light In Our Solar System

Recently, scientists using Hubble Space Telescope’s data have found a “ghostly light” around our solar system. When light from stars, planets, and starlight scattered due to dust is accounted for, some extra light is also observed, and researchers are trying to understand its origin.

The scientists observed around 200,000 Hubble images in a project known as SKYSURF to find the excess light beyond the known sources. Researchers managed to find a faint glow that suggests a previously unknown structure in our solar system.