NASA Images: 5 Stunning Hubble Telescope Photos Capture Glimpses of Outer Space, from Protostars to Globular Clusters

The world of outer space holds endless mysteries and secrets waiting to be discovered. High-resolution telescopes and satellites closely observe objects and events in outer space to develop a better understanding of human beings. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Hubble Telescope is one of the largest and most versatile space telescopes, recognized for its vital research capabilities.

Here are the five best images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope:

This light-year-long, caterpillar-like knot of interstellar gas and dust is a newborn star: a protostar.

Stars form in large clouds of gas and dust called molecular clouds. These huge clouds are cool and clump together. Over time, gravity causes some of these clumps to collapse. When this happens, friction causes the material to heat up, eventually leading to the creation of a protostar.

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

In the cold waters of Foxe Basin near Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, chunks of sea ice drift through swirling eddies of oily ice, creating patterns reminiscent of the clouds of gas and dust we see throughout the universe.

Sea ice often starts out as oil ice, a thick layer of tiny ice crystals on the ocean surface. While there is no oil involved, oil ice causes the ocean It looks slippery. As the temperature drops, the fat ice thickens and melts into more solid ice plates.

Changes in ice, ocean and atmospheric conditions in the northernmost part of the Earth have a major impact on the entire planet, as the Arctic region acts like an air conditioning system. Much of the Sun’s energy is transported from the tropical regions of our planet through winds and weather systems to the Arctic, where it is then lost to space. This process helps to cool the planet.

This tangled planetary nebula is the final stage of a mid-sized star like our Sun, billions of years from now. As it consumes the last of its core fuel, the dying star expels much of its outer layer, creating the twisted filaments seen here.

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

This bright field is a 10-billion-year-old globular cluster, NGC 6496, and the stars that make it up are pretty special. Not only do they have high metallicity, but some of them are also variable stars, meaning their brightness varies over time.

NGC 6496 hosts a few long-period variable stars (giant pulsating stars whose brightness can take up to a thousand days, or even longer, to change) and short-period eclipsing binaries, which dim when eclipsed by a stellar companion.

The way the brightness of these stars changes can reveal a lot about their mass, radius, luminosity, temperature, composition and evolution, providing astronomers with measurements that would be difficult or even impossible to obtain through other methods.

Four billion light-years away, within a vast collection of nearly 500 galaxies nicknamed “Pandora’s Cluster,” NASA’s Hubble Telescope I found the dim, ghostly light of wandering stars.

These stars are no longer bound to any galaxy and are moving freely among the cluster’s galaxies. By observing the light from the orphaned stars, Hubble astronomers gathered evidence suggesting that as many as six galaxies were torn apart within the cluster over a period of 6 billion years.

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