WISE Wizard of the Stars

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

A wiz­ard of space and time sits in the con­stel­la­tion of Cepheus in this image of NGC 7380 from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Sur­vey Explorer or WISE.

Explore the vast neb­ula. What other char­ac­ters or shapes do you see in this cloud of gas and dust? Leave a com­ment below.

NGC 7380, also known as the Wiz­ard Neb­ula cov­ers about 110 light-years. It takes light 110 years to cross from one side of this star-forming neb­ula to the other. The neb­ula itself is located about 7,000 light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Cepheus, the King. The star clus­ter is embed­ded in the neb­ula which gave it birth. The stars are young, hav­ing only emerged from their cocoon about 5 mil­lion years or so.

WISE scans the entire sky in infrared light pick­ing up their faint glow. The orbit­ing obser­va­tory is joined in space by two other infrared obser­va­to­ries; NASA’s Spitzer Space Tele­scope and Her­schel Space Obser­va­tory from the Euro­pean Space Agency. These infrared obser­va­to­ries detect heat from objects in space, even the barely notice­able heat of a cool star. The WISE mis­sion dif­fers from the other two by scan­ning the entire sky. Astronomers using this tech­nique have seen all sorts of pre­vi­ously unseen cos­mic trea­sures, such as cool stars, bright galax­ies, comets, aster­oids that pass near Earth.

NGC 7380 was dis­cov­ered by British astronomer Car­o­line Her­schel in 1787. Although her brother, William Her­schel is more well known, Car­o­line made many impor­tant astro­nom­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions and dis­cov­er­ies, includ­ing sev­eral comets. She was awarded the Royal Astro­nom­i­cal Soci­ety Gold Medal for her work in 1828.

Comments

S 17-11-2010, 07:57

This reminds me of the Man in the Moon’s face — wise and all-knowing!

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