Hubble Bubble

Not to be confused with Canadian Gum Hubba-Bubba, Hubble has released a great birthday image for it’s 26th birthday.  I’m a few days late to celebrate, but it’s still a beautiful image. Known as NGC 7653, the Bubble nebula is 8,000 light years distant in the constellation of Cassiopeia.  The reason for this natural bubble shape is that the star just left of center in the image is ionizing a surrounding cloud of Hydrogen with it’s powerful stellar wind.  As electrons and protons recombine at the edges of the bubble, they release an infrared photon that can be clearly seen...

Best Ever Image of a Cometary Globule: Also What is a Cometary Globule?

The best ever image of a Cometary Globule has been released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama desert in Chile. It looks a lot like a nebula right? In actuality a cometary globule is a very specific type of nebula.  It’s very faint, and it’s formation is a matter of debate among the astronomical community.  A cometary globule is small, containing the mass of a few suns worth of material.  Compare this to a typical nebula, which has enough material to form thousands or even hundreds of thousands of stars. The...