Singing Frog

Credit: NASA, ESA, Y. Nazé (Uni­ver­sity of Liège, Bel­gium) and Y.-H. Chu (Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois, Urbana)

Although he is side­ways, I see a singing frog with mouth wide open and head up.

Actu­ally, NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope cap­tured a view of the inside of a starry geode. A geode on Earth is a hol­low rock, usu­ally with crys­tals on the inside. This object called N44F shows us the inside of its 35 light-year wide hol­low bub­ble. The neb­ula is a birth­place for new stars. The bub­ble is being blown up by a very hot star buried within this once dense cold cloud. Fast mov­ing solar winds move push gas and dust away from the cen­ter. The winds from the cen­tral star in N44F move at 4 mil­lion miles per hour. Our Sun’s solar wind moves at almost 1 mil­lion miles per hour.

If we look close at the walls of our inter­stel­lar bub­ble, we find pil­lars sim­i­lar to the columns of the Eagle Neb­ula. These pil­lars are areas of dense and cold dust and gas and extend four to eight light years. Intense radi­a­tion from the cen­tral star eats away at the sur­round­ing gas and dust. Dense pock­ets of gas and dust can sur­vive the blast a bit longer than the sur­round­ing neb­ula. Like wind­socks they point away from strong flow of solar wind.

Astronomers know only of a few inter­stel­lar bub­bles like N44F. Astronomers usu­ally find such bub­bles around mas­sive stars or around clus­ters of stars. N44F is unique because there is only one star.

N44F is found in the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud about 160,000 light years away. The Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud is a neigh­bor­ing dwarf galaxy; a com­pan­ion to our Milky Way Galaxy. The neb­ula lies in the south­ern con­stel­la­tion Dorado.