The Monkey Head Nebula is part of NGC 2174, located 6400 light-years away in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter). It is a vibrant region filled with young stars set against cosmic gas and dust. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Hubble has released a new image of the Monkey Head Nebula to celebrate its 24th year in orbit.
To celebrate its 24th year in orbit, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has released a beautiful new image of part of NGC 2174, also known as the Monkey Head Nebula. This colorful region is filled with young stars embedded within bright wisps of cosmic gas and dust.
NGC 2174 lies about 6400 light-years away in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter). Hubble previously viewed this part of the sky back in 2001, creating a stunning image released in 2011, and the space telescope has now revisited the region to celebrate its 24th year of operation.
Nebulae are a favorite target for Hubble. Their colorful plumes of gas and fiery bright stars create ethereally beautiful pictures.
The detail shown in this image lies within NGC 2174, a nebula that gets its more common name, the Monkey Head Nebula, from its curiously familiar shape when viewed in wide-field images.
In April of this year, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope will be celebrating 24 years of observing. To celebrate this milestone, the observatory is releasing a brand new image of part of NGC 2174, otherwise known as the Monkey Head nebula. This new Hubblecast episode showcases this beautiful image, which views a colorful region filled with young stars embedded within bright wisps of cosmic gas and dust. Credit: ESA/Hubble
The nebula is a violent stellar nursery, packed with the ingredients needed for star formation. However, the recipe for cooking up new stars isn’t very efficient and most of the ingredients are wasted as the cloud of gas and dust disperses. This process is accelerated by the presence of fiercely hot young stars which trigger high-velocity winds that help to blow the gas outwards.
This video sequence pans across new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations of part of NGC 2174, also known as the Monkey Head Nebula.
A vibrant palette of colors can be seen in this new image of NGC 2174. Dark brown and rust-colored dust clouds billow outwards, framed against a background of bright blue gas. These striking hues are formed by combining several Hubble images taken with different colored filters, to reveal a broad range of colors not normally visible to the human eye.
The icing on this cosmic birthday cake takes the form of young white and pink stars sprinkled amongst the glowing clouds, pushing away the dark stellar nurseries in which they formed. The key ingredient in NGC 2174 is hydrogen gas, which is ionized by the ultraviolet radiation emitted by the young stars. As a result, this region is also known as an HII region — a large cloud of ionized gas.
This video sequence begins by zooming through the constellation of Orion (The Hunter), finishing on new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations of part of NGC 2174, also known as the Monkey Head Nebula.
This image marks 24 years of Hubble. This milestone will be further celebrated by a conference being held in Rome, Italy, in March of this year. The conference, entitled Science with the Hubble Space Telescope IV, will highlight and celebrate the scientific breakthroughs that Hubble has made over the last two decades and look into the future at the topics and key questions that will shape the field of astrophysics in the next decade.
This portion of the Monkey Head Nebula was imaged in the infrared using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. Hubble’s earlier Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 image from 2011 inspired its choice as the telescope’s 24th-anniversary image. A processed version of the WFPC2 dataset was entered into Hubble’s Hidden Treasures image processing competition by Yurij Tukachev.
Artist’s impression of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope orbiting Earth. Credit: NASA & ESA (M. Kornmesser)
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