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Cosmic superbubble shaped by stars

Jonathan Nally — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:59:46 +0000

The N 44 superbubble nebula is being formed by hot winds from bright, young stars.

THIS STRIKING VIEW shows a ‘superbubble’ nebula surrounding the young star cluster NGC 1929 within the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.

The superbubble (formally known as LHA 120-N 44) has been produced by the combination of two processes. Firstly, stellar winds—streams of charged particles from the very hot and massive stars in the central cluster—cleared out the central region. Then massive stars exploded as supernovae, producing shockwaves and pushing the gas out further to form the glowing bubble.

The vast shell of material is around 325 by 250 light-years across. For comparison, the nearest star to our Sun is just over four light-years away.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a small neighbouring galaxy to the Milky Way. It contains many regions where clouds of gas and dust are forming new stars.

Although the superbubble is shaped by destructive forces, new stars are forming around the edges where the gas is being compressed. Like recycling on a cosmic scale, this next generation of stars will breathe fresh life into NGC 1929.

The image was made by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) from observational data collected by the Very Large Telescope and identified by Manu Mejias, from Argentina, who participated in ESO’s Hidden Treasures 2010 astrophotography competition.

Download desktop wallpapers:

NGC 1929 superbubble 1024×768 (413.1 KB)

NGC 1929 superbubble 1280×1024 (657.3 KB)

NGC 1929 superbubble 1600×1200 (952.2 KB)

NGC 1929 superbubble 1920×1200 (986.2 KB)

Adapted from information issued by ESO / Manu Mejias.

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A nebula to dye for!

Jonathan Nally — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 10:00:39 +0000

The colourful Rho Ophiuchi star formation region, about 400 light-years from Earth, contains very cold (around -250 degrees Celsius), dense clouds of cosmic gas and dust, in which new stars are being born. Astronomers using the APEX telescope have detected hydrogen peroxide molecules in the area marked with the red circle.

MOLECULES OF HYDROGEN PEROXIDE have been found for the first time in interstellar space. The discovery gives clues about the chemical link between two molecules critical for life: water and oxygen.

On Earth, hydrogen peroxide plays a key role in the chemistry of water and ozone in our planet’s atmosphere, and is familiar for its use as a disinfectant or to bleach hair blonde. It’s also sometimes used as rocket fuel!

An international team of astronomers made the discovery with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX), situated on the 5,000-metre-high Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Andes.

They studied a region in our galaxy close to the star Rho Ophiuchi, about 400 light-years away. The region contains very cold (around -250 degrees Celsius), dense clouds of cosmic gas and dust, in which new stars are being born.

The clouds are mostly made of hydrogen, but contain traces of other chemicals, and are prime targets for astronomers hunting for molecules in space.

Telescopes such as APEX, which make observations of light at millimetre- and submillimetre-wavelengths, are ideal for detecting the signals from these molecules.

Now, the team has found the characteristic signature of light emitted by hydrogen peroxide, coming from part of the Rho Ophiuchi clouds.

“We were really excited to discover the signatures of hydrogen peroxide with APEX,” says Per Bergman, astronomer at Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden. “We knew from laboratory experiments which wavelengths to look for, but the amount of hydrogen peroxide in the cloud is just one molecule for every ten billion hydrogen molecules, so the detection required very careful observations.”

Bergman is lead author of the study, which is published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The APEX telescope studies the cosmos at millimetre- and submillimetre-wavelengths—ideal for detecting certain molecules.

Clue to the origin of water

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is a key molecule for both astronomers and chemists. Its formation is closely linked to two other familiar molecules, oxygen and water, which are critical for life. Because much of the water on our planet is thought to have originated in space, scientists are keen to understand how it is formed.

Hydrogen peroxide is thought to form in space on the surfaces of cosmic dust grains—very fine particles similar to sand and soot—when hydrogen (H) is added to oxygen molecules (O2). A further reaction of the hydrogen peroxide with more hydrogen is one way to produce water (H2O).

This new detection of hydrogen peroxide will therefore help astronomers better understand the formation of water in the Universe.

“We don’t understand yet how some of the most important molecules here on Earth are made in space. But our discovery of hydrogen peroxide with APEX seems to be showing us that cosmic dust is the missing ingredient in the process,” says Bérengère Parise, head of the Emmy Noether research group on star formation and astrochemistry at the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, and a co-author of the paper.

To work out just how the origins of these important molecules are intertwined will need more observations of Rho Ophiuchi and other star-forming clouds with future telescopes such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)—and help from chemists in laboratories on Earth.

The new discovery may also help astronomers understand another interstellar mystery—why oxygen molecules are so hard to find in space. It was only in 2007 that oxygen molecules were first discovered in space, by the satellite Odin.

APEX is a collaboration between the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), the Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) and European Southern Observatory. The telescope is operated by ESO.

A full view of the Rho Ophiuchi star formation region, which is a favourite of amateur astronomers. Rho Ophiuchi itself is the bright star near the top of the image. The bright yellowish star in the bottom left is Antares, one of the brightest stars in the sky. Below and to Antares’ right is the globular star cluster Messier 4.

Download wallpapers of the Rho Ophiuchi clouds:

1024 x 768 (475.0 KB)

1280 x 1024 (833.5 KB)

1600 x 1200 (1.2 MB)

1920 x 1200 (1.3 MB)

Adapted from information issued by ESO / S. Guisard (www.eso.org/~sguisard) / H.H.Heyer.

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Celestial treasure trove

Jonathan Nally — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:00:49 +0000

WISE's infrared view of the Andromeda galaxy ignores most of the stars, and instead brings out detail in dust clouds heated by the energy of stars.

WISE space telescope studied the cosmos at infrared wavelengths
It took 2.7 million images during its mission
Huge archive of images and data has now been released

ASTRONOMERS ARE SIFTING through hundreds of millions of galaxies, stars and asteroids collected in the first bundle of data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

WISE launched into space on December 14, 2009, on a mission to map the entire sky in infrared light with greatly improved sensitivity and resolution over its predecessors.

From its orbit, it scanned the skies about one-and-a-half times while collecting images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light. It took more than 2.7 million images over the course of its mission, capturing objects ranging from faraway galaxies to asteroids relatively close to Earth.

Like other infrared telescopes, WISE required coolant to chill its heat-sensitive detectors. When this frozen hydrogen coolant ran out, as expected, in early October, 2010, two of its four infrared channels were still operational.

The survey was then extended for four more months, with the goal of finishing its sweep for asteroids and comets in the main asteroid belt of our Solar System.

The satellite went into hibernation in early February of this year.

Spiral galaxy IC 342 is normally hard to see through the stars of the Milky Way, but WISE's infrared eyes can see it spectacular detail.

The Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex is one of the nearest star-forming regions to Earth. WISE's infrared capabilities enable astronomers to see normally hidden details.

The mission’s nearby discoveries included 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and 133 near-Earth objects, which are those asteroids and comets with orbits that come close to Earth’s path around the Sun.

Data from the first 57 percent of the sky surveyed is now accessible through an online public archive. The complete survey, with improved data processing, will be made available in the spring of 2012.

A predecessor to WISE, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, served a similar role about 25 years ago, and those data are still valuable to astronomers today. Likewise, the WISE legacy is expected to endure for decades.

Astronomers will use WISE’s infrared data to hunt for hidden oddities, and to study trends in large populations of known objects. Survey missions often result in the unexpected discoveries too, because they are looking everywhere in the sky rather than at known targets.

The whole collection can be seen at: http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/gallery_images.html

Adapted from information issued by JPL.

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Going out with a bang

Jonathan Nally — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 14:01:41 +0000

Giant loops of gas ejected by dying stars in the star formation region NGC 3582, bear a striking resemblance to solar prominences.

GIANT LOOPS OF GAS bearing a striking resemblance to solar prominences are seen in this image of the nebula NGC 3582.

The loops are thought to have been ejected by dying stars, although new stars are also being born within this stellar nursery.

These energetic youngsters emit intense ultraviolet radiation that makes the gas in the nebula glow, producing the fiery display shown here.

NGC 3582 is part of a large star-forming region in the Milky Way, called RCW 57, close to the central plane of the Milky Way.

The famous astronomers John Herschel first spotted this complex region of glowing gas and dark dust clouds in 1834, during his stay in South Africa.

Some of the stars forming in regions like NGC 3582 are much more massive than the Sun. These monster stars emit energy at prodigious rates and have very short lives that end in the stellar explosions called supernovae.

The material ejected from these explosions creates bubbles in the surrounding gas and dust. This is the probable cause of the loops visible in this picture.

Here’s a short video that takes you on a sweeping journey into NGC 3582:

The image was captured by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) La Silla Observatory in Chile.

It is a false-colour image made up of separate exposures taken through multiple filters. From the Wide Field Imager, data taken through a red filter are coloured in green and red, and data taken through a filter that isolates the red glow characteristic of hydrogen are also shown in red. Additional infrared data from the Digitised Sky Survey are shown in blue.

The image was processed by ESO using the data identified by amateur astronomer Joe DePasquale, from the United States, who participated in ESO’s Hidden Treasures 2010 astrophotography competition. The competition was organised by ESO in October-November 2010, for everyone who enjoys making beautiful images of the night sky using astronomical data obtained using professional telescopes.

ESO’s Hidden Treasures 2010 competition gave amateur astronomers the opportunity to search through ESO’s vast archives of astronomical data, hoping to find a well-hidden gem that needed polishing by the entrants.

More information: Hidden Treasures

Adapted from information issued by ESO, Digitised Sky Survey 2 and Joe DePasquale.

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Rosy glow of young stars

Jonathan Nally — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 01:00:27 +0000

The red glow of ionised hydrogen gas surrounds a group of young stars, which together make up the object known as NGC 371.

THE VIVID RED CLOUD in this new image from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope is a region of glowing gas surrounding the star cluster NGC 371.

NGC 371 is an example of a mature ‘star birth’ region. The red cloud is made of ionised hydrogen—an HII region in astronomers’ jargon—surrounding a place that has experienced high rates of recent star birth, leading to the formation of an ‘open star cluster’.

An open star cluster is group of stars that formed together and are all in the same vicinity, but with a random scattering (unlike ‘globular’ star clusters, which form into a ball shape).

Stars in open clusters all originate from the same diffuse HII region. Over time the majority of the hydrogen is used up to form the stars, leaving behind just a leftover shell of hydrogen such as the one in this image.

NGC 371′s home, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), is a dwarf galaxy a mere 200,000 light-years away, which makes it one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way.

Watch a video that zooms into the SMC and NGC 371:

The SMC contains stars at all stages of their evolution…from the highly luminous young stars found in NGC 371 to supernova remnants of dead stars.

The energetic young stars emit copious amounts of ultraviolet radiation, making the surrounding gas light up with a colourful glow that extends for hundreds of light-years in every direction.

NGC 371 is of particular interest due to the unexpectedly large number of variable stars it contains. These are stars that change in brightness over time.

A particularly interesting type of variable star, known as slowly pulsating B stars, can also be used to study the internal working of stars through a technique known as asteroseismology, and several of these have been confirmed in this cluster.

Variable stars play a pivotal role in astronomy—some types are invaluable for determining distances to far-off galaxies and the age of the Universe.

The data for this image were selected from the ESO archive by Manu Mejias as part of the Hidden Treasures competition.

Adapted from information issued by ESO / Manu Mejias.

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Ghostly green eye

Jonathan Nally — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 18:37:35 +0000

NGC 6826 is a planetary nebula, the dying stages of a star's life.

THIS AMAZING IMAGE shows the ghostly “eye-like” planetary nebula NGC 6826, located 2,200 light-years from Earth.

Despite their name, planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. They got their name because, through early telescopes, they looked more like planets than stars.

In fact, a planetary nebula is a complex cloud of gas produced in the dying stages of certain stars’ lives.

A star’s life ends when the fuel available to its thermonuclear engine runs out. When the star is about to expire, it becomes unstable and ejects its outer layers, forming a planetary nebula and leaving behind a tiny, but very hot, stellar remnant, known as white dwarf.

Anatomy of planetary nebula NGC 6826

At NGC 6826′s centre, the white dwarf is driving a fast “wind” of gas into older gas material, forming a hot interior bubble that pushes the older gas ahead of it to form a bright rim. The faint green of the eye is believed to be gas that made up almost half of the star’s mass for most of its life.

The red blobs at the edges are called FLIERs, or Fast Low-Ionisation Emission Regions. They’re thought to be dense regions of gas either flung off by the star, or floating in space and caught up in the outflowing rush of the stellar wind.

Stellar evolution theory predicts that our Sun will experience a similar fate to NGC 6826 in about five billion years (out of an estimated overall lifespan of some ten billion years).

And by the way, what does the NGC in its name stand for? The New General Catalogue is a huge list of more than 7,800 “deep space” objects compiled in 1880s by the Danish-Irish astronomer J.L.E. Dreyer.

Downloadable wallpaper image: 1280 x 1280

Adapted from information issued by Bruce Balick (University of Washington), Jason Alexander (University of Washington), Arsen Hajian (U.S. Naval Observatory), Yervant Terzian (Cornell University), Mario Perinotto (University of Florence, Italy), Patrizio Patriarchi (Arcetri Observatory, Italy) and NASA/ESA.

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Toddler stars tear up the nursery

Jonathan Nally — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:13:16 +0000

Baby stars (hidden behind thick clouds of dust) are ejecting gas at speeds as high as one million kilometres per hour, tearing up the clouds within which they were born.

THE DRAMATIC EFFECT newborn stars have on the gas and dust from which they formed is shown in a new image from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope

Although the stars themselves are not visible, material they have ejected is colliding with the surrounding gas and dust clouds and creating a surreal landscape of glowing arcs, blobs and streaks.

The star-forming region NGC 6729 is part of one of the closest stellar nurseries to the Earth and hence one of the best studied.

Stars form deep within thick gas clouds, which means the earliest stages of their development cannot be seen with visible-light telescopes because of obscuration by dust.

In this image, there are very young stars hidden behind the gas and dust at the upper left of the picture. Although they can’t be seen, the havoc that they have wreaked on their surroundings is clearly visible.

High-speed jets of gas shooting out from the baby stars at velocities as high as one million kilometres per hour are slamming into the surrounding gas and creating shock waves. These shocks cause the gas to shine and form the strangely coloured glowing arcs and blobs known as Herbig–Haro objects.

This enhanced-colour picture was created from images taken using the FORS1 instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Images were taken through two different filters that isolate the light coming from glowing hydrogen (shown as orange) and glowing ionised sulphur (shown as blue).

Adapted from information issued by ESO.

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Ghostly veil in space

Jonathan Nally — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 13:30:48 +0000

The eastern section of the Veil Nebula, part of a much larger nebula called the Cygnus Loop.

HANGING IN SPACE LIKE A GHOSTLY curtain in space is the Veil Nebula, part of a much larger nebula called the Cygnus Loop.

The Cygnus Loop is the expanding gas cloud remnant of a supernova (exploded star) which happened between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago. It is almost 1,500 light-years from Earth.

In effect it is a giant gas bubble in space, and what we see is the edge of the bubble. It’s also very large—about 90 light-years wide. If we could see the whole Loop with the naked eye in the night sky, it would appear three times wider than the full Moon.

The entire Loop can be picked up a certain special wavelengths, but at visible light wavelengths only part of it is visible. The Veil Nebula is one of those parts.

The image above shows the eastern part of the Veil, and was taken with the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope in the Canary Islands.

It is a combination of three images made with special filters: one that brings out the presence of hydrogen (coloured red in the image), one that highlights doubly ionised oxygen (green) and one that reveals sulphur (blue).

See the full-size image here. Warning – huge file! 3.67MB – 6,079 x 3,880 pixels.

The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) comprises the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope (WHT), the 2.5m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT), and the 1.0m Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT), operating on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, Spain.

The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes is operated on behalf of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the Nederlanse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). The STFC, the NWO, and the IAC have entered into collaborative agreements for the operation of and the sharing of observing time on the ING telescopes.

Story copyright Jonathan Nally, SpaceInfo.com.au. Additional info courtesy ING. Image courtesy of the IAC astrophotography group (A. Oscoz, D. López, P. Rodríguez-Gil and L. Chinarro).

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Stunning blue nebula

Jonathan Nally — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:08:58 +0000

Reflection nebula Messier 78 is 1,350 light-years from Earth. The blue colour comes from reflected starlight. See below for a link to the full-size image, and screen wallpapers you can download.

Nebula Messier 78 is 1,350 light-years from Earth
Blue colour comes from starlight reflected from tiny dust particles
Home to dozens of very young stars

THE NEBULA MESSIER 78 takes centre stage in this image taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, while the stars powering the bright display take a backseat.

The brilliant starlight ricochets off dust particles in the nebula, illuminating it with scattered blue light.

Messier 78 is a fine example of a reflection nebula. The ultraviolet radiation from the stars that illuminate it is not intense enough to ionise the gas to make it glow — its dust particles simply reflect the starlight that falls on them.

Despite this, Messier 78 can easily be observed with a small telescope, being one of the brightest reflection nebulae in the sky. It lies about 1,350 light-years away in the direction of the constellation of Orion (The Hunter) and can be found northeast of the easternmost star of Orion’s belt.

This new image of Messier 78 from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory is based on data selected by Igor Chekalin in his winning entry to the ESO Hidden Treasures competition.

See the full-size image here.

Home to young stars

The pale blue tint seen in the nebula in this picture is an accurate representation of its dominant colour. Blue hues are commonly seen in reflection nebulae because of the way the starlight is scattered by the tiny dust particles that they contain—the shorter wavelength of blue light is scattered more efficiently than the longer wavelength red light.

This image contains many other striking features apart from the glowing nebula. A thick band of obscuring dust stretches across the image from the upper left to the lower right, blocking the light from background stars. In the bottom right corner, many curious pink structures are also visible, which are created by jets of material being ejected from stars that have recently formed and are still buried deep in dust clouds.

Two bright stars, HD 38563A and HD 38563B, are the main powerhouses behind Messier 78.

However, the nebula is home to many more stars, including a collection of about 45 low mass, young stars (less than 10 million years old) in which the cores are still too cool for hydrogen fusion to start, known as T Tauri stars.

Studying T Tauri stars is important for understanding the early stages of star formation and how planetary systems are formed.

Remarkably, this complex of nebulae has also changed significantly in the last ten years. In February 2004 the experienced amateur observer Jay McNeil took an image of this region with a small (75mm) telescope and was surprised to see a bright nebula—the prominent fan shaped feature near the bottom of this picture—where nothing was seen on most earlier images.

This part of the object is now known as McNeil’s Nebula and it appears to be a highly variable reflection nebula around a young star.

Screen wallpapers:

Messier 78 wallpaper 1068 x 768

Messier 78 wallpaper 1280 x 1024

Messier 78 wallpaper 1600 x 1200

Adapted from information issued by ESO. Image credit: ESO and Igor Chekalin.

Star spangled nebula

Jonathan Nally — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 23:44:53 +0000

This new Spitzer Space Telescope infrared image of the North American Nebula reveals a multitude of young stars, ordinarily hidden in visible wavelength images by veils of dust.

Nebula shaped like the North American continent
Infrared view pierces the veil of dust, revealing stars
Thousands of young stars seen in Spitzer telescope image

STARS AT ALL STAGES of development, from dusty little tots to young adults, are on display in a new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

This cosmic community is called the North American Nebula. At visible light wavelength pictures, the region resembles the North American continent, with the most striking resemblance being the Gulf of Mexico.

But in Spitzer’s infrared view, the continent disappears. Instead, a swirling landscape of dust and young stars comes into view.

“One of the things that makes me so excited about this image is how different it is from the visible image, and how much more we can see in the infrared than in the visible,” said Luisa Rebull of NASA’s Spitzer Science Centre at the California Institute of Technology.

Rebull is lead author of a paper about the observations, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

“The Spitzer image reveals a wealth of detail about the dust and the young stars here.”

Dusty environment

Rebull and her team have identified more than 2,000 new, candidate young stars in the region. There were only about 200 known before.

Because young stars grow up surrounded by blankets of dust, they are hidden in visible-light images. Spitzer’s infrared detectors pick up the glow of the dusty, buried stars.

Spot the difference. Visible light (left) and infrared wavelength (right) views of the North American Nebula, taken by the Digitised Sky Survey and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, respectively. Infrared can see through the dust and gas.

A star is born inside a collapsing ball of gas and dust. As the material collapses inward, it flattens out into a disc that spins around together with the forming star like a spinning top. Jets of gas shoot perpendicularly away from the disc, above and below it.

As the star ages, planets are thought to form out of the disc—material clumps together, ultimately growing into mature planets. Eventually, most of the dust dissipates, aside from a tenuous ring similar to the one in our Solar System, referred to as Zodiacal dust.

Family portrait

The new Spitzer image reveals all the stages of a star’s young life, from the early years when it is swaddled in dust to early adulthood, when it has become a young parent to a family of developing planets. Sprightly “toddler” stars with jets can also be identified in Spitzer’s view.

“This is a really busy area to image, with stars everywhere, from the North American complex itself, as well as in front of and behind the region,” said Rebull.

A cluster of young stars in the "Gulf of Mexico," part of the North American Nebula.

“We refer to the stars that are not associated with the region as contamination,” Rebull added. “With Spitzer, we can easily sort this contamination out and clearly distinguish between the young stars in the complex and the older ones that are unrelated.”

See the full-size image here.

More mysteries to solve

The North American Nebula still has a mystery surrounding it, involving its power source. Nobody has been able to identify the group of massive stars that is thought to be dominating and illuminating the nebula.

The Spitzer image, like images from other telescopes, hints that the missing stars are lurking behind the Gulf of Mexico portion of the nebula. This is evident from the illumination pattern of the nebula, especially when viewed with the detector on Spitzer that picks up 24-micron infrared light. That light appears to be coming from behind the Gulf of Mexico’s dark tangle of clouds, in the same way that sunlight creeps out from behind a rain cloud.

The nebula’s distance from Earth is also a mystery. Current estimates put it at about 1,800 light-years from Earth.

Adapted from information issued by NASA / JPL-Caltech. Images courtesy NASA / JPL-Caltech / L. Rebull (SSC / Caltech).

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