Incredible Hubble Telescope picture shows space 'sword' piercing immense celestial 'heart'

A blazing blue sword seems to pierce a giant cosmic heart in a beautiful new picture captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The "sword" consists of two super-heated and ionized gas jets which move through space from the opposite poles of a newborn star called IRAS 05491+0247. The "core" is the cloud of dust and remaining gases surrounding the protostar, according to Hubble team members.

This spectacular interplay between jets and clouds creates an unusual heavenly vision known as the Herbig-Haro object. The one photographed here by Hubble is called HH111 and is located about 1300 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Orion.

Hubble captured the image using its Large Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which looks at both optical and infrared (heat) light wavelengths.

"Herbig-Haro objects actually release a lot of light at optical wavelengths, but they are difficult to observe because their surrounding dust and gas absorb much of the visible light," European Space Agency (ESA) officials wrote in a description of the image, which was released today (Aug. 30).

"Thus, the ability of WFC3 to observe at infrared wavelengths—where observations are not as affected by gas and dust—is crucial to successfully observe [Herbig]-Haro objects," they added.

Hubble, a joint NASA/ESA mission, embarked on Earth's low orbit aboard Space Shuttle Discovery in April 1990. The first images from the iconic observatory were fuzzy, a problem that team members quickly identified was caused by a defect in the 7.9-foot-wide (2.4-metre) primary Hubble mirror.

Space astronauts dealt with this problem in December 1993, and Hubble was modernized and maintained during four other maintenance missions. The WFC3 instrument was installed on the latest of these space shuttle flights to Hubble in May 2009.

Hubble continues to provide a breathtaking view of the cosmos, but he has begun to show his age, and without the shuttle, astronauts can no longer access the observatory. (It's technically possible that a crewed vehicle such as SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule could reach Hubble, but that idea apparently has not been seriously investigated.) The telescope has overcome several glitches recently, including a computer problem that closed its super sharp eye for more than a month this summer.