Hubble Space Telescope team members are celebrating the last birthday in the mission's 20s. In honor of that milestone, on Thursday (April 18), the team released a Hubble image featuring the hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula.
Not to be confused with the Crab Nebula found in the constellation Taurus, the Southern Crab Nebula is the beautifully symmetrical structure created by an uneven binary star system, according to the image's description. In that system, one star has already exploded and turned into a white dwarf.
The other star isn't dead yet. It's a red giant and also reaching the end of its life, shedding its outer layers. The white dwarf's gravity draws in some of this material cast off by its companion, only to eject it again into space. This interaction creates the mesmerizing shapes of the Southern Crab Nebula.
Related: What Is the Eagle Nebula?
To some, the clouds of dust resemble a crab. But depending on the pareidolia perspective of the viewer, in which they see a certain pattern or image when looking at something abstract, the material might also resemble a moth or a haute couture dress.
The European Space Agency, which partners with NASA on the Hubble mission, released this picture in anticipation of Hubble's 29th birthday. The iconic spacecraft ascended to space aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.
The then $1.5 billion project became more costly right after launching: Researchers found that the telescope's mirror was flawed and produced fuzzy images. Three years later, in December 1993, the space shuttle Endeavour brought a crew to perform five spacewalks to do repair work and install two more cameras. One of these was the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, which captured two of Hubble's most famous photos: the pillars of the Eagle Nebula and the Hubble Deep Field.
This space telescope, named after U.S. astronomer Edwin Hubble, is expected to run at least another five years, according to a January 2019 engineering report.
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