August 4, 2012
You are a way for the cosmos to know itself, Carl Sagan once said. On your birthday, the cosmos got to know itself a little better.
The Bubble Nebula
Birthday · August 4, 2012
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APOD published August 4, 2012. Credit: Yves Van den Broek. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Blown by the wind from a massive star, this interstellar apparition has a surprisingly familiar shape. Cataloged as NGC 7635, it is also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 10 light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and right of the Bubble's center is a hot, O star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and around 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 lies a mere 11,000 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. This view of the cosmic bubble is composed of narrowband and broadband image data, capturing details in the emission region while recording a natural looking field of stars.
Image credit: Yves Van den Broek