" Inside the Image // Hubble Space Telescope"
"Mystic Mountain"
This image is one of the most iconic of all Hubble images, called Mystic Mountain,
and it is a place of enormously Active Star formation. This entire pillar is about three
light-years in duration that means it's so long that it takes light traveling at 186,000
miles per second, takes it three years to go from the bottom to top. And the entire area is filled
with this really condensed collection of dust and gas that's created this stellar nursery.
We see on the outside edge here where the material is heated and evaporating off the surface of the
cloud but you also have Stellar winds that are sculpting this like a like a Michelangelo that
would be sculpting a statue, knocking pieces of the nebula off into Interstellar space so
we have a mechanical sculpting process along with a heating process from radiation coming
off of the stars, so the two together are what combine to create this gloriously detailed image
You see these jets coming out of two sides of that top pillar, and down here again
those are signatures of stars actually forming. Material is coming down collapsing onto the star
and getting heated up and when it tries to get out it has to shoot out in jets.
This bow shape, that is actually a shock wave from the material in the jet hitting
the interstellar medium and heating it up. One of the best images I think that we've
we've gotten but this one is just the right angle that you get a gorgeous view of it.
It's become an iconic image I think for several reasons, uh one is that it has such incredible
detail in there but also because it holds a fascination as being a place where we can actually
see stellar systems forming before our eyes, it's also famous I think because of its sheer beauty.
I mean there's a lot of art in Hubble images a large fraction of the value of Hubble is not
just to give us the science data that we need but it's to appreciate the beauty of the universe.
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