Your dose of space porn for today comes courtesy of the European Southern Observatory. It shows an amazing cosmic "sculpture" in NGC 346, a very bright star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The universe is the canvas. The materials are light, wind and fire. And the artist is, well, the laws of physics, I guess, notably those governing stellar formation.
NGC 346 is what's known as an open cluster of stars, which means those stars probably all came from the same collapsed cloud of matter. They are nestled within a pretty emission nebula -- the newly born stars heat the nearby gas so much, the gas itself emits light, just like a big neon sign. And that makes for one incredible light show, captured in this case by the Wide Field Imager at the La Silla Observatory's 2.2-meter telescope in Chile. (You can see a close-up zoom video of the region here.)
It certainly inspired whoever wrote the accompanying press release to wax a bit more poetic than usual:
The light, wind and heat given off by massive stars have dispersed the glowing gas within and around this star cluster, forming a surrounding wispy nebular structure that looks like a cobweb. NGC 346, like other beautiful astronomical scenes, is a work in progress, and changes as the aeons pass. As yet more stars form from loose matter in the area, they will ignite, scattering leftover dust and gas, carving out great ripples and altering the face of this lustrous object.
It is a lustrous object indeed...
Tags: Astrophysics, Stars, Stellar Physics
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