Astronomers are celebrating the 33rd anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope with an ethereal photo of a nearby star-forming region, NGC 1333. The nebula is located in the Perseus Molecular Cloud and is about 960 light-years away.

Hubble’s colorful view, displayed through its unique ability to take images from ultraviolet to near-infrared light, reveals a “bubbling cauldron” of glowing gas and black dust churning and exploding around several hundred newly formed stars embedded in the dark this cloud Hubble is just scratching the surface because most of the star-forming storm is hidden behind clouds of fine dust—essentially soot—that are thicker toward the bottom of the image. The black in the picture is not empty space, but full of dust.

To capture this image, Hubble peered through a veil of dust at the edge of a giant cloud of cold molecular hydrogen—the raw material for building new stars and planets under the relentless pull of gravity. The image highlights the fact that star formation is a messy process in our messy universe.

Fierce stellar winds, likely from the bright blue star at the top of the image, blow through a curtain of dust. The fine dust scatters the starlight into blue wavelengths.

Farther down, another bright, extremely hot star shines through filaments of dark dust, looking like the Sun shining through scattered clouds. A diagonal row of fainter companion stars appears reddish because dust filters the starlight, allowing more of the red light to pass.

The bottom of the image shows a keyhole deep in the dark nebula. Hubble captures the reddish glow of ionized hydrogen. It looks like a fireworks finale, with many overlapping events. This is caused by pencil-thin jets ejected from newly formed stars outside the optical frame. These stars are surrounded by spinning disks, which may eventually produce planetary systems, and strong magnetic fields that direct two parallel beams of hot gas deep into space, like a twin lightsaber from sci-fi movies. They carve patterns into the hydrogen cocoon, like trails of laser light emission. Jets are the birth announcement of a star.

This view provides an example of the time when the Sun and our planets formed within such a dusty molecular cloud, 4.6 billion years ago. Our Sun did not form in isolation, but was embedded within a frenzied star birth pit, perhaps even more energetic and massive than NGC 1333.

Hubble was launched into Earth orbit on April 25, 1990, by NASA astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. To date, the legendary telescope has made approximately 1.6 million observations of nearly 52,000 celestial targets. This treasure trove of knowledge about the universe is stored for public access at the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Hubble Space Telescope is an international collaborative project between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland operates the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble and Webb science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Washington, DC