Check out the iconic photo he took on his 33rd birthday

The Hubble Space Telescope has been providing us with beautiful images of the universe for at least 33 years. About 1.6 million observations on nearly 52,000 different objects. And to celebrate this new anniversary, today NASA and the European Space Agency are unveiling yet another new image. That nebula, NGC 1333, is located in the Perseus molecular cloud, about 960 light-years from Earth.

The image demonstrates once again the unique ability of the Hubble Space Telescope to probe the spectrum of light from the ultraviolet to the near infrared. At the edges of a giant cloud of cold molecular hydrogen, it reveals a bubbling cauldron of glowing gas and black dust stirred and blasted by several hundred newly formed stars. And it highlights the very turbulent aspect of the star formation process in our universe.

Gas, dust and stars

Note that despite the sharpness of the image, in the end, the Hubble Space Telescope only gives us a small glimpse of what’s going on in this turbulent region of the universe. Most newborn stars remain hidden behind clouds of fine dust. Moreover, the black areas in the image do not correspond to empty spaces, but rather to dusty regions, from which stars sometimes penetrate brighter than others.

At the bottom of the image, a cloud of ionized hydrogen appears as a kind of glowing keyhole. Or the grand finale of a fireworks display. Because outside the field of the image, there are other emerging stars. Stars surrounded by disks of gas and dust can produce planetary systems. But also the powerful magnetic fields that guide two parallel beams of hot gas into the depths of space. They draw patterns on the hydrogen cloud, like traces of laser light.