5/3/2023–|Last updated: 3/5/202312:44 PM (Makkah)
New images of the Hubble Space Telescope showed a scene that mimics in its beauty the famous Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, “The Starry Night”.
Although the famous artist drew his painting from his imagination, a great similarity with it was shown by the images taken by the space telescope of a distant star called V838 MON.
light echo
The footage shows pulses of light emanating from the star similar to those emanating from a light bulb, displacing dust that extends around it from trillions of miles in space.
V838 Mon is located about 20,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros, at the outer edge of our Milky Way galaxy.
I miss, i miss…
Hubble captured a “light echo” from the star V838 Mon. A sequence of images shows how a pulse of light from this star illuminated its surrounding clouds of material!
Find out more about V838 Mon, including an image released #OTD in 2004: https://t.co/Tr6ifbtHEC pic.twitter.com/Y5ZPGzzOTz
— Hubble (@NASAHubble) March 4, 2023
Dr. Paddy Boyd, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said that these swirls that the images showed may be caused by the turbulence in the dust and gas around the star as a result of their continued slow expansion.
She added that it is possible that both dust and gas were ejected from the star during an earlier eruption, similar to what happened in 2002, as this eruption occurred tens of thousands of years ago.
Boyd indicated that the Hubble telescope photographed the star V838 Mon and its light echo several times after the star erupted in January 2002, and this was done with the intention of tracking changes in the appearance of dust as the pulses caused by the central star continued to expand outwards at the speed of light.
Brighter than the sun
During the explosion, the faint star suddenly brightened and became about 600,000 times brighter than the Sun. As a result, it was one of the brightest stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and then died out in April 2002.
This star resembles a type of object that we call a nova in which a sudden increase in brightness occurs as a result of thermonuclear explosions on the surface of stars.
Van Gogh’s Starry Night, painted by the Dutch artist in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in June 1889, just before sunrise, is usually considered one of the most significant night paintings in the history of plastic arts, if not the most remarkable at all.
