Hubble captures star birth

Hubble has released a new close-up of star formation in the Trifid Nebula, showing gas and dust shifting over 29 years in a region about 5,000 light-years from Earth. (science.nasa.gov) The image was published April 20, 2026, as NASA and the European Space Agency marked the Hubble Space Telescope’s 36th anniversary ahead of the mission’s April 24 launch anniversary. Hubble first photographed the same Trifid scene in 1997. (science.nasa.gov) (esa.int) A star-forming nebula is a cold cloud where gravity packs gas and dust tightly enough for new stars to ignite. In the Trifid, several massive stars outside Hubble’s frame have spent at least 300,000 years blowing an expanding bubble that compresses nearby material and starts new rounds of star birth. (science.nasa.gov) (esa.int) Dust is the key obstacle and the key map. NASA said the new visible-light image traces ridges, knots, and dark lanes where dust either hides young stars or outlines the edges of stellar nurseries being carved open by radiation. (science.nasa.gov) The new portrait was taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, which has a wider field of view and higher sensitivity than the camera used for the 1997 image. NASA said that upgrade lets astronomers compare the two epochs and spot changes on “human time scales.” (science.nasa.gov) (esa.int) One labeled feature is Herbig-Haro 399, a narrow jet of plasma fired from a young protostar buried in the brown dust cloud near the top of the frame. NASA said tracking changes in that outflow helps researchers measure its speed and estimate how much energy the newborn star is dumping into the surrounding gas. (science.nasa.gov) (esa.int) The Trifid Nebula, also cataloged as Messier 20, sits in the constellation Sagittarius and was first recorded by Charles Messier in 1764. NASA lists its apparent magnitude at 6.3, bright enough to be seen with a small telescope under dark skies. (science.nasa.gov) The older 1997 Hubble image showed radiation from massive stars tearing apart a dense cloud and eroding jets roughly three-quarters of a light-year long. The 2026 revisit turns that same patch of sky into a before-and-after record of how quickly young stars can reshape their birth clouds. (science.nasa.gov 1) (science.nasa.gov 2) Hubble’s new Trifid image is less a single snapshot than a 29-year baseline: the dust that once looked fixed now reads like moving weather around a stellar nursery. (science.nasa.gov)