NASA scientists witnessed an amazing sight: Hubble imaged the Sharpless Nebula, and it looks exactly like a snow angel in the sky.
Up there, in the deepest depths of space, there are still many secrets to be discovered. And the Hubble telescope, one of NASA's newest instruments, has allowed scientists to collect a lot of information about some of the most amazing celestial objects in the universe. One of them is Sharpless Nebula, which is shot in all its beauty, in an almost “Christmas” version – albeit an out-of-season one. Let's discover something more together.
Snow angel in the sky
It has been a few years since it was taken, but this photo remains one of the most beautiful images ever immortalized by man. Hubble telescopeAnd the. Meanwhile, the James Webb Telescope was launched to replace it, providing us with the largest number of images at a resolution previously unimaginable. However, the Sharpless Nebula is still something special. In fact, he looks like a heavenly snow angel, A An off-season “Christmas” gift. At the center is a very small, high-mass star, while its blue “wings” are twin lobes of extremely hot gas, extending outward.
And Dust and gas rings, in orbit around the star, appears to form a “belt” that pulls the nebula in the center, forming something like an hourglass – which is why it is called a bipolar nebula. The halo surrounding the “wings” is nothing more than a contrasting imprint of their heat and movement against the background of cold gases and dust. The photo is really interesting, it was taken by Wide Field Camera 3 by Hubble: The telescope used narrow-band visible and near-infrared filters to capture as much detail as possible.
No Sharpless Nebula
The nebula imaged by Hubble is Sharpless 2-106 (also called Sh2-106): An emission nebula with a markedly dipole shape, located in the constellation Cygnus, about 2000 light-years away from us. It is located in a fairly isolated location in our Milky Way Galaxy, and is very large – several light-years across. It was discovered in 1946, and contains at its center a very small star, estimated to be about 100 thousand years old, and of great mass. He'll probably be a huge star Spectral class O8: Its surface temperature can reach at least 36,700 degrees Celsius.
It extends around it A large disk surrounding the star, made up of very dense dust. Furthermore, the star has strong stellar winds, causing it to lose significant mass every year. The star is responsible for vital activity which can also be seen from the image of the angel. With him InfraredIn fact, it ionizes the gas nearby: but the gas far away reflects its own bright light.
In addition to being very active, this area is small The “furnace” of the stars. In fact, a very small cluster of low-mass protostars has been discovered not far from the central region of the nebula. Sightings were already made in the early 1990s, with the observation of a small group of stars no more than a million years old. A second star-forming region was later found nearby. In general, attendance About 600 possible protostars.
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