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Lagoon Nebula shines in gorgeous new Hubble image
By JoAnna Wendel published about 6 hours ago
Within the Lagoon Nebula lies the star cluster NGC-6530, made up of a few thousand stars.
A portion of the open cluster NGC 6530 appears as a roiling wall of smoke studded with stars in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, ESO, O. De Marco)
Young stars twinkle within a rainbow curtain of dust and gas in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
The image highlights NGC-6530, an open cluster of a few thousand stars more than 4,000 light-years away in interstellar space.
NGC-6530 is located within a vast cloud of dust and gas called the Lagoon Nebula. You can spot a faint smear of the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation Sagittarius on a dark night, but unfortunately, human eyes can’t make out the dazzling array of colors at that distance. Nebulas are stellar nurseries, where hydrogen gas collapses over millions of years to form stars.
Hubble captured this image while scientists were scanning the Lagoon Nebula for structures called proplyds, a kind of protoplanetary disk that surrounds newborn stars.
More:
https://www.space.com/lagoon-nebula-hubble-space-telescope-photo