@space_telescopes

class="content__text" If you stare at this long enough 👀, your eyes might start fooling you into seeing something they’re not. We know from experience. (Anyone else see a beetle?) 😳 Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to look at a small, dense cloud of gas and dust in the center of this image. CB 130-3—as the cloud is named—is an object known as a dense core, a compact mass of gas and dust. This particular dense core is in the constellation Serpens, and seems to billow across a field of background stars. ✨ Dense cores like CB 130-3 are the birthplaces of stars, and are particularly interesting to astronomers. During the collapse of these cores, enough mass can accumulate in one place to reach the temperatures and densities required to ignite hydrogen fusion, marking the formation of a new star. While it may not be obvious from this image, a compact object teetering on the brink of becoming a fully fledged star is embedded deep within CB 130-3. #Hubble #stars #space #beetle Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA & STScI, C. Britt, T. Huard, A. Pagan. ALT TEXT: An irregularly shaped bright orange object composed of dense gas and dust appears darker and more compact at the center. This dense cloud, called CB 130-3, is outlined by thinner gas and dust in light shades of blue. The background shows a multitude of bright stars against a black background. Only a few stars appear within the orange area.

February 22, 2023