Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Galactic watercolors: eye-catching image of cloud of new-fangled stars in Milky Way

In a cloud of amazing shades of blue, this picture shows the very feeling of a close by region of the galaxy where new stars are being produced.

The R Coronae Australis star lies at the spirit of a nearby star-forming area and is enclosed by a fragile bluish reflection nebula entrenched in a vast dust cloud.

It is one of several stars in this province that fit in to the class of very juvenile stars that differ in brightness and are still enclosed by the clouds of gas and dust from which they created.


The light blue colour is typically due to the reflection of starlight off minute dust particles.

This eye-catching image produced by the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. 

The image is a mixture of twelve split pictures taken all the way through red, green and blue filters.

It shows a part of sky that spans generally the width of the full Moon and is situated some 420 light-years away in the minute constellation of Corona Australis (the Southern Crown).

The concentrated radiation specified off by these burning young stars interacts with the gas adjoining them and is either reflected or re-emitted at a diverse wavelength.

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