The Swan Nebula: A Perfect Storm of Turbulent Gases | Hubble Space Telescope
Merry Christmas! This year, NASA has a cosmic swan 🦢 for you.
This nebula, Messier 17 (also nicknamed the Swan or Omega Nebula), was imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. This painting-like image shows vast clouds of gas and dust illuminated by the intense radiation from young stars. The entire nebula covers about 40 light-years in total. It is a popular target for amateur astronomers. They can obtain good quality images using small telescopes.
Like the fury of a raging sea, this image from the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope shows a bubbly ocean of glowing hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur gas in the extremely massive and luminous molecular nebula Messier 17. This Hubble photograph captures a small region within Messier 17 (M17), a hotbed of star formation. M17, also known as the Omega or Swan Nebula, is located about 5500 light-years away in the Sagittarius constellation. The colors in the image represent a variety of gases. Red represents sulphur; green, hydrogen; and blue, oxygen.
The wave-like patterns of gas have been sculpted and illuminated by a torrent of ultraviolet radiation from young, massive stars that lie outside the picture to the upper left. The glow of these patterns highlights the 3D structure of the gases. The ultraviolet radiation is carving and heating the surfaces of cold hydrogen gas clouds. The warmed surfaces glow orange and red in this image. The intense heat and pressure cause material to stream away from the surface, creating the glowing veil of even hotter green-colored gas that masks background structures. The pressure on the tips of the waves may trigger new star formation within them. The image, roughly three light-years across, was taken on May 29-30, 1999, with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.
Release Date: April 24, 2003
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