Overview
- NASA and ESA released a new Hubble portrait to mark the telescope’s 36th year, targeting a compact, star-forming patch of the Trifid Nebula about 5,000 light-years away in Sagittarius.
- The new view, set against Hubble’s 1997 image of the same spot, shows changes on human timescales such as shifting ripples in gas and a growing jet from a forming star.
- That jet, called Herbig–Haro 399, is launched by a hidden protostar, and the image also shows signs of a fainter counterjet along the cloud’s neck.
- A small green arc near a faint red point may signal that a young star’s disc is being stripped by intense ultraviolet light from massive stars nearby.
- Using the later-installed Wide Field Camera 3, Hubble delivered a wider, more sensitive view that feeds ongoing joint studies with the James Webb Space Telescope and adds to its archive of more than 1.7 million observations.