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If you need a little help getting into the holiday spirit, the Hubble Space Telescope is here to assist. This gorgeous new image shows a bipolar star-forming region, called Sharpless 2-106, (S106 for short) which looks like a soaring, celestial snow angel. The outstretched “wings” of the nebula are actually the contrasting imprint of heat and motion against the backdrop of a colder medium. Twin lobes of super-hot gas, glowing blue in this image, stretch outward from the central star, forming the wings.
Hubble snapped this image in February 2011, using the Wide Field Camera 3. Visible narrow-band filters that isolate the hydrogen gas were combined with near-infrared filters that show structure in the cooler gas and dust.
A massive, young star, IRS 4 (Infrared Source 4), is responsible for all the activity here. A ring of dust and gas orbiting the star acts like a belt, cinching the expanding nebula into an hourglass shape. Hubble’s sharp resolution reveals ripples and ridges in the gas as it interacts with the cooler interstellar medium.
Although you can’t see them here, detailed studies of the nebula have also uncovered several hundred brown dwarfs. At purely infrared wavelengths, more than 600 of these sub-stellar objects appear. These “failed” stars weigh less than a tenth of the Sun. Because of their low mass, they cannot produce energy through nuclear fusion like the Sun does.
Be sure to view the Hubble News Center “3D Look at a Star-Forming Region” video associated with this marvelous image. It is a Winter treat. Gives one a sense of perspective, if not inhuman scale: Speaking of which, I wonder how are friendly Home Star, and its diverse retinue of worlds, would measure placed within the glittering frame of this spectacular panorama of “snow” and fire. An insignificant point of light, at best? ( Though, curiously, one with a distinctive wobble in its long-term motion? Could it be…? )
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/38/
According to my logic I think this should be called ~”Snow Angel” because how one can create a snow angle in vacuum? It’s opposite of making a ‘void’ in matter (snow)… 😛
Nevertheless – a jolly good picture!