The nebula’s tranquil name contrasts starkly with the violent activity that sculpted it. Located 4 to 5 thousand light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, the Lagoon Nebula is a vast stellar nursery 100 light-years across. Clouds of hydrogen gas are slowly collapsing to form new stars, whose bright ultraviolet light sets the surrounding gas aglow in shades of red.

The young stars’ ultraviolet radiation also pushes and erodes the gas and dust around it, creating billowing cloud-like swirls. In the last 5 years, astronomers have also found that several of these young stars have shot out long tendrils of matter from their poles.

These jets, known as Herbig-Haro objects, are usually formed by young stars that are still surrounded by a disk of material that is slowly glomming onto the star. The finding provides strong support for astronomers’ theories about star formation in such hydrogen-rich regions.

A sharp eye on a dark night can pick out the Lagoon Nebula as a faint gray patch in the Milky Way, but a telescope and filtering is needed to bring out the nebula’s striking colors. In this image, light from glowing hydrogen is colored red, light from ionized nitrogen is shown in green and light through a yellow filter, interestingly, is colored blue. The blue-white flare at the upper-left of the image is scattered light from a bright star just outside the field of view.

Image: NASA/ESA

See Also:

• Wow! Celebrate Hubble’s 20th With Best Space Image Ever
• Massive Star Blows Fancy Hourglass Nebula
• New Telescope Captures Dazzling Image of Orion Nebula
• Photo: WISE Telescope Captures Heart Nebula
• Beautiful New Image of a Rare Blue Nebula

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Authors: Lisa Grossman

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