Hubble's Christmas gift: A pulsing gossamer wreath of stars and gas

WATCH: It's Hubble's sparkling Christmas gift: A wreath of stars and a gossamer whirl of gas. Almost a quarter of a century on, the space telescope just keeps on giving.

IT'S Hubble's sparkling Christmas gift: A wreath of dozens of stars and a gossamer whirl of gas. Almost a quarter of a century on, the space telescope just keeps on giving.

It's a delicate ripple of light around the gossamer ring - a reflection of starlight on dust clouds captured by Hubble over a period of five weeks.

The star, named RS Puppis, 10 times bigger than our sun, is surrounded by thick, dark clouds of gas and dust known as a nebula.

"For most of its life, a star is pretty stable, slowly consuming the fuel at its core to keep it shining brightly," NASA explained.

Christmas wreath ... Observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, collected over the span of five weeks, show the variable star RS Puppis growing alternately brighter and dimmer - a phenomenon known as a light echo.

"However, once most of the hydrogen that stars use as fuel has been consumed, some stars evolve into very different beasts - pulsating stars. They become unstable, expanding and shrinking over a number of days or weeks and growing brighter and dimmer as they do so."

"The apparent motion shown in these Hubble observations is an example of a phenomenon known as a light echo," the agency said. "The dusty environment around RS Puppis enables this effect to be shown with stunning clarity. As the star expands and brightens, we see some of the light after it is reflected from progressively more distant shells of dust and gas surrounding the star, creating the illusion of gas moving outwards."

It's just the latest of Hubble's many extraordinary visual gifts.

The Hubble Space Telescope has caught the eerie, wispy tendrils of a dark interstellar cloud being destroyed by the passage of one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades star cluster. Like a flashlight beam shining off the wall of a cave, the star is reflecting light off the surface of pitch black clouds of cold gas laced with dust. These are called reflection nebulae.

Launched in April 1990, the venture at first appeared to be a colossal failure. It had been sent into orbit with a defective lens - giving it a blurry view.

Hubble Space Telescope has trained its razor-sharp eye on one of the universe's most stately and photogenic galaxies, the Sombrero galaxy, Messier 104 (M104).

But an urgent Shuttle mission with a specially-designed "contact lens" soon solved that.

The 'Ghost Head Nebula' is one of a chain of star-forming regions lying south of the 30 Doradus nebula in the Large Magellanic cloud.

Since then, it has become an eye on the universe we have come to take for granted.

Resembling a nightmarish beast rearing its head from a crimson sea, this celestial object is actually just a pillar of gas and dust. Called the Cone Nebula (in NGC 2264)

It was supposed to operate for 20 years. Twenty-three years later, it's successor is about to be launched - the billion-pixel space camera named Gaia.

The graceful, winding arms of the majestic spiral galaxy M51 (NGC 5194) appear like a grand spiral staircase sweeping through space.

The new telescope has been tasked with mapping the Milky Way in greater detail than ever before. It'll also no doubt be taking a few close-ups to show off its extraordinary zoom.

Gaia is due to blast off from French Guiana tonight.

Undersea coral? Enchanted castles? Space serpents? These eerie, dark pillar-like structures are actually columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that are also incubators for new stars. The pillars protrude from the interior wall of a dark molecular cloud like stalagmites from the floor of a cavern.

It will then spend five years orbiting around the Sun at a distance of 1.5 million km from the Earth.

This is an image of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula located about 8,000 light-years away.

The $550 million European Space Agency (ESA) telescope is so sensitive that it could measure a person's thumbnail from the Moon. Another example is that it can see a human hair from 1000km away.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has provided images of Saturn in many colours, from black-and-white, to orange, to blue, green, and red. But in this picture, image processing specialists have worked to provide a crisp, extremely accurate view of Saturn, which highlights the planet's pastel colours.

The spacecraft will spin slowly, sweeping its two telescopes across the sky and focusing their light simultaneously onto a digital camera.

An image of the Cartwheel Galaxy taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Gaia's 'eye' is the largest ever sent into space and has the most sensitive set of light detectors ever assembled.

This Hubble Space Telescope view shows one of the most dynamic and intricately detailed star-forming regions in space, located 210,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic cloud (SMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.

The mission's aim is to build a three-dimensional picture of our galaxy, measuring precise distances to a billion stars.

Among the largest images ever produced with the Earth-orbiting observatory - this picture shows the most detailed view so far of the entire Crab Nebula ever made.

Even this is a small fraction of the Milky Way, as astronomers believe there are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy.

This Hubble image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. As the two galaxies smash together, billions of stars are born, mostly in groups and clusters of stars. The brightest and most compact of these are called super star clusters.

"It can do it with incredible accuracy. It's the biggest camera ever put into space," said Ralph Cordey, head of science and exploration of the telescope's builder, Astrium.

The star cluster Pismis 24 lies in the core of the large emission nebula NGC 6357.

Another of Gaia's objectives is to help in the hunt for exoplanets - new worlds beyond our own solar system.

This craggy fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds looks like a bizarre landscape from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, which is even more dramatic than fiction, captures the chaotic activity atop a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars.

NASA's Kepler mission has so far confirmed the existence of 167 exoplanets with hundreds more being investigated, but Cordey anticipates Gaia will likely discover thousands of new planets, while further missions will be able to uncover more detail about them.

Centaurus A, also known as NGC 5128, is well known for its dramatic dusty lanes of dark material. Hubble's new observations, using its most advanced instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3, are the most detailed ever made of this galaxy.

Once Gaia starts operations, around Easter, astronomers will have to contend with a flood of data.

This new Hubble image, captured and released to celebrate the telescope's 23rd year in orbit, shows part of the sky in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter).

Even after being compressed by software, the data produced by the five-year mission is expected to fill over 30,000 CD ROMs.

Previously unseen details of a mysterious, complex structure within the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) are revealed by this image of the 'Keyhole Nebula, ' obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope.

##