Celebrating Hubble: Mystic Mountain

Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)
Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

Looking like a Tolkienesque painting by John Howe or Alan Lee, this pillar of dust in the Carina Nebula (called the Mystic Mountain) is being assaulted from without and within.

Newly born stars inside are trying to ‘break free’. Their radiation is shaping and compressing the gas. Resulting jets of gas are streaming off the visible surface, while the intense starlight that bathes the Mystic Mountain from outside is corroding it.

Unfortunately the nebula is not really this colourful – the nebula is presented in false colour. Oxygen is colour-coded as blue, sulphur as red, and hydrogen and nitrogen as green.

 


Hubble: The Universe Revealed

Hubble-Preview-with-Crab-Nebula

Astronomy Now celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope – the greatest telescope history has ever seen – with a selection of truly out- of-this-world imagery. This 116-page special issue is filled with superb pictures of glowing star-forming nebulae, the beautiful death throes of stars, gracefully spiralling galaxies, our nearest neighbours in the Solar System and the most distant look into the Universe ever taken. Order your copy of Hubble: The Universe Revealed today.