Astronomy may be considered the ultimate art form, especially considering the images sometimes produced by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Now a new Hubble image is being billed as a project of "painting with light."
Astronomers used the separated colors produced by light's interaction with oxygen and hydrogen to investigate the star-forming processes in a cloud of gas and dust called nebula NGC 2080, nicknamed the Ghost Head Nebula. The colors represent more than beauty -- they explain much about the nature of such nebulae.
The new picture was released Oct. 18 by the European Space Agency.
Light emitted by different chemical elements, and from elements at different temperatures, is separated by special filters to reveal the nature of complicated and violent star-formation processes.
The Ghost Head Nebula is one of a chain of star-forming regions lying south of the 30 Doradus nebula in a nearby galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. These regions have been studied in detail with Hubble and have long been identified as unique star-forming sites.
Astronomers involved in producing the image explained what the colors mean:
The red and blue light comes from regions of hydrogen gas heated by nearby stars until it is fully ionized. The green light of the filament shape on the left comes from doubly ionized oxygen. The energy to illuminate the filament is supplied by a powerful stellar wind coming from a massive star just outside the image.
The white region in the center is a combination of all three emissions, and indicates a core of hot, massive stars in this star formation region. The intense emission from these stars has carved a bowl shaped cavity in the surrounding gas.
Two bright regions (the eyes of the ghost), named A1 (left) and A2 (right), are very hot, glowing blobs of hydrogen and oxygen. The bubble in A1 is produced by the hot, intense radiation and powerful stellar wind from a single massive star. A2 has a more complex appearance due to the presence of more dust, and it contains several hidden, massive stars.
The massive stars in A1 and A2 must have formed within the last 10,000 years since their natal gas shrouds are not yet disrupted by the powerful radiation of the newly born stars.
These results will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal.
The image spans 55 light-years of space. The Large Magellanic Cloud is some 168,000 light-years away. Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri of the Observatoire de Paris, France, led the study.
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