NASA images: 5 stunning photos taken by the Hubble telescope reveal glimpses of outer space, from protostars to globular clusters | Mint

The world of outer space hides countless mysteries and secrets that are yet to be discovered. High definition telescopes and satellites closely observe outer space objects and phenomena to develop a better understanding of humans. The Hubble Telescope of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is one of the most versatile and largest space telescopes that is renowned for its significant research potential.

Here are the five best photos taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope:

This light-year-long clump of interstellar gas and dust, which looks a bit like a caterpillar, is a newborn star – a protostar.

Stars form in large clouds of gas and dust called molecular clouds. These giant clouds cool and turn into clumps. Eventually, gravity causes some of these clumps to collapse. When this happens, the friction causes the material to heat up, eventually leading to the formation of a protostar.

The protostar has not yet developed the ability to generate energy like a star like the Sun, which fuses hydrogen into helium at its core. Instead, the protostar’s energy comes from the heat generated by that initial collapse. Over time, the protostar will develop the ability to generate energy like other Sun-like stars.

In the cold waters of the Foxe Basin near Baffin Island in Canada’s Arctic region, chunks of sea ice drift among swirls of grease ice, creating patterns that remind us of the clouds of gas and dust we see throughout the universe.

Sea ice often begins as grease ice, a soup-like layer of tiny ice crystals on the ocean surface. Although it does not contain oil, grease ice makes the ocean slick. As temperatures drop, grease ice thickens and coalesces into more solid ice slabs.

Changes in ice, ocean and atmospheric conditions in the northernmost part of Earth have a huge impact on the entire planet because the Arctic region acts like Earth’s air conditioner. Most of the sun’s energy is carried from our planet’s tropical regions by winds and weather systems to the Arctic, where it is lost to space. This process helps keep the planet cool.

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

Don’t be confused by their name: planetary nebulae actually have nothing to do with planets. When early astronomers first observed them through telescopes, they appeared large and vaguely like some planets — and the name stuck.

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

NGC 6496 contains some long-period variable stars – giant pulsating stars whose brightness can change over a thousand days or more – and short-period eclipsing binaries, which dim when they are eclipsed by a stellar companion.

The way these stars change in brightness can reveal a lot about their mass, radius, luminosity, temperature, composition and evolution, allowing astronomers to obtain measurements that would be difficult or impossible to obtain by other means.

Four billion light-years away, inside a giant collection of about 500 galaxies that has been nicknamed the “Pandora Cluster,” NASA’s Hubble spotted the faint, ghostly light of wandering stars.

These stars are no longer bound to any one galaxy, and continue to move freely among the galaxies in the group. By observing the light coming from the orphaned stars, Hubble astronomers gathered evidence that suggests that six galaxies inside the group broke into pieces over a period of 6 billion years.

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