                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                                2022 March 23

                        The Bubble Nebula from Hubble
    Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & Copyright: Mehmet Hakan
                                   Özsaraç

   Explanation: Massive stars can blow bubbles. The featured image shows
   perhaps the most famous of all star-bubbles, NGC 7635, also known
   simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the
   7-light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at
   work. Above and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star,
   several hundred thousand times more luminous and some 45-times more
   massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from
   that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser
   material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula
   and associated cloud complex lie a mere 7,100 light-years away toward
   the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp, tantalizing view of
   the cosmic bubble is a reprocessed composite of previously acquired
   Hubble Space Telescope image data.

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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
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