The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of a star that resembles a giant Claude Monet painting of the sky.

Swirling like a giant cotton candy, this colorful cloudscape is about 1,000 light-years from Earth and surrounds the Herbig-Haro object HH ​​505.

According to NASA, the Herbig-Haro object is a bright, bright region surrounding a newborn star. They form when stellar winds or jets of gas are ejected from these young stars, causing ultra-fast shock waves or outflows that collide with nearby gas and dust at high speed.

HH505’s outflow originates from a star named IX Ori, located between the stars Alnitak, Saif, and Rige on the outskirts of the famous Orion Nebula. Orion is a highly dynamic active region in the universe and one of the most photographed regions of the Milky Way galaxy. It is so close to Earth and so large, 24 light-years across, that it can be seen from Earth.

[Related: This glittery Hubble image shows how far we’ve come in studying distant stars.]

It is also the seedbed of giant galactic baby stars, an example of how old life can give rise to new life in the universe. You can Everything from planetary nebulae to supernova debris is the raw material needed to build new stars.

The Orion Nebula is full of intense ultraviolet radiation from all of the bright young stars, and 32-year-old Hubble is particularly sensitive. This sensitivity and amount of ultraviolet light on stars in this region will allow astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to directly observe the high-energy efflux from baby stars and learn more about their structure and formation.

The colorful new image was created by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Survey (ACS) and a team of astronomers studying the outflow and dramatic properties of the protoplanetary disk. NASA also reveals bright shockwaves formed by the outflow and streams of slow-moving stellar material.
Beautiful and colorful images of nebulae are some of Hubble’s most popular contributions to the study of the universe. To mark his 28th anniversary of Hubble, he photographed the Lagoon Nebula, followed by his NGC 2014 NGC 2020 images two years later. Both of these have advanced interstellar nursery research.