From the August 2026 issue

Still going strong: Hubble’s 36th anniversary image

HST celebrated its 36th birthday in space with a detailed look at the famous Trifid Nebula (M20), a dusty stellar nursery.
By | Published: September 18, 2026

A detailed telescope image of a star-forming region, showing dramatic pillars and billowing clouds of gas and dust in vivid shades of orange, red, and brown, contrasting with cooler blue nebulosity in the upper left. A tall, dark pillar dominates the center with a bright jet of material streaming from its tip, illuminated by nearby stars. Smaller pillars and sculpted gas structures are visible throughout, and several bright foreground stars with diffraction spikes are scattered across the scene.
Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI
A detailed telescope image of a star-forming region, showing dramatic pillars and billowing clouds of gas and dust in vivid shades of orange, red, and brown, contrasting with cooler blue nebulosity in the upper left. A tall, dark pillar dominates the center with a bright jet of material streaming from its tip, illuminated by nearby stars. Smaller pillars and sculpted gas structures are visible throughout, and several bright foreground stars with diffraction spikes are scattered across the scene.
Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI

Life in space is hard. Most orbiting observatories retire well before their 20th birthday. Yet the Hubble Space Telescope has survived and continues to thrive well into its 30s. Astronomers celebrated the observatory’s 36th birthday in April by releasing a new image of the Trifid Nebula (M20). This stellar nursery lies about 5,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. The photo captures a small area southeast of the Trifid’s center. Several massive stars located off the top of the image have been sculpting the nebula for at least 300,000 years. High-energy ultraviolet radiation from these behemoths ionizes and erodes the gaseous pillar that dominates the view’s left side. The bright streak shooting from the pillar’s head is a high-powered jet ejected by a hidden protostar.

Richard Talcott is a former senior editor and current contributing editor of Astronomy.

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