Glowing Angelfish

Credit: Euro­pean South­ern Obser­va­tory (ESO)

The faint neb­ula known as Gum 19 shows a light and dark angelfish shape in this infrared image from the Euro­pean South­ern Observatory.

Explore this lit­tle known neb­ula. What do you see in this image? A light and dark face? A broad arrow­head? Tell us your stories.

A blue super­giant, called V391 Velo­rum, illu­mi­nates the hydro­gen gas of the neb­ula. The glow­ing edge of the dark cloud is a stel­lar nurs­ery. Gas and dust, dri­ven away from V391 Velo­rum by intense ultra­vi­o­let radi­a­tion and blis­ter­ing solar winds bunch together. Even­tu­ally this gas and dust will gather together in knots and as grav­ity pulls the mate­r­ial together, new stars may form. These stars in turn will carve out bub­bles in the neb­ula as well. Thou­sands of years from now, this neb­ula likely will look much dif­fer­ent. The super­mas­sive, blue-giant star, V391 Velo­rum, will prob­a­bly explode in a super­nova explo­sion. These mas­sive stars are five to ten times larger and heav­ier than our Sun. They don’t shine for long. V31 Velo­rum burns at a sear­ing 30,000 degrees Cel­sius. After only about ten mil­lion years, they blow up as super­novae. These explo­sions release so much energy in light and heat that they can eas­ily blaze brighter than a galaxy for a short period of time. Their explo­sive ends spread more mate­r­ial to be used in future star and planet formation.

This image of Gum 19 was taken by the infrared instru­ment called SOFI mounted on ESO’s New Tech­nol­ogy Tele­scope. The ESO obser­va­tory sits high in the moun­tains in Chile. Gum 19, named for Aus­tralian astro­physi­cist Colin S. Gum, is located about 22,000 light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion of Vela, the Sail.

Comments

S 20-04-2010, 09:32

it’s a door in the dark, open­ing to let in the light on the other side

womanastronomer 20-04-2010, 10:05

If you turn your head to the left, it looks like a jel­ly­fish. There is also a snake swim­ming towards the jel­ly­fish. Unfor­tu­nately, jel­ly­fish are not very tasty.

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