Ghostly Star-Forming Pillars Of Gas and Dust (Taken By Hubble Telescope)
The Hubble Space Telescope supplied a lot of the images on this list. It should not shock you that it managed to collect the final image too. The image might frighten some people, as it has often been referred to as a beast from your nightmares. However, the celestial object is simply a pillar of gas and dust known as the Cone Nebula. The name comes from the ground-based images showing a conical shape. The pillar resides in a very wild, turbulent star-forming region of space. This image only shows 2.5 light-years of the total Cone Nebula.
The height takes so long to reach that you’d need to make 23 million roundtrips to the Moon to reach a nearly equivalent distance. The pillar alone is 7 lightyears long, which is quite a lot. Obviously, radiation from hot, younger stars has managed to slowly erode the nebula for millions of years now. Today, ultraviolet light heats up the edges of the darker cloud. In turn, this releases gas into a relatively empty region of space. Ultraviolet radiation then causes hydrogen gas to glow, producing the red halo of light you see around the pillar. The arc with halo is actually 65 times larger than our entire solar system!