California

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

A wave of gas and dust that looks much like Cal­i­for­nia (if you turn it a bit) runs diag­o­nally through this image from NASA’s WISE satellite.

Explore the infrared image of Menkhib and the Cal­i­for­nia Neb­ula. Fol­low the curtain-like shape of the Cal­i­for­nia Neb­ula as it runs diag­o­nally through the image. WISE, short for Wide-field Infrared Sur­vey Explorer, sees light slightly dif­fer­ently than our eyes do. WISE “sees” the heat of stars. Menkhib, near the glow­ing red dust cloud, is one of the hottest stars vis­i­ble in the night sky. Menkhib and other hot stars were born from the gas and dust of the Cal­i­for­nia Neb­ula just a few mil­lion years ago. It’s the light from these new suns that causes the gas and dust, seen as green in this image, of the neb­ula to glow. We see almost the entire 100 light-year span of the Cal­i­for­nia Neb­ula in this view.

Menkhib is run­ning quite a fever. It’s tem­per­a­ture is more than six times hot­ter than our Sun at more than 66,000 degrees Fahren­heit (37,000 Kelvin). It shines 13,500 times brighter than our Sun. While nearly all stars appear blue to WISE’s cam­eras, to our eyes, Menkhib is a blue-white star. Menkhib is also super huge. It has a mass of 40 Suns. Menkhib is known as a run­away star. For unknown rea­sons, the star is zip­ping away from its birth­place within the Cal­i­for­nia Neb­ula at high speed. With its gar­gan­tuan size, speed and energy out­put, strong stel­lar winds pile up in front of it cre­at­ing a shock­wave. The squeez­ing of this gas causes it to heat up and WISE sees it as the red cloud in the image.

Menkhib is an odd-sounding name. Ara­bic astronomers in the Mid­dle Ages clas­si­fied many of the stars in the sky and we keep their names today. Menkhib is Ara­bic for the “shoul­der” of the Pleiades.

Both Menkhib and the Cal­i­for­nia Neb­ula lie about 1,800 light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Perseus, the hero from Greek mythol­ogy. This puts them within the same part of the Milky Way’s Orion spi­ral arm that we are located.