Dusty cocoons in the Rosette Nebula. Image credit Nasa/Esa
13th April 2010
Another image of our universe that looks like a stunning work of art. This time it’s a cosmic gem from the Nasa/ESA Herschel Space Observatory, showing part of the Rosette Nebula in different colour coded wavelengths. This nebula is getting on with the important job of spawning baby massivestars, 5,000 light years away in the constellation Monoceros. The above image shows a complicated structure of cavities, filaments, and finger like protrusions. All these weird structures in the gas are produced by stellar winds coming from young energetic stars, many of which are part of the nebula’s main star cluster not in the picture.
Inside the ends of these finger like structures are infants, babies, stars still in the process of growing. Some of these cold, dusty, stellar wombs are concealing stars that will be up to 10 times as massive as our sun. Inside these protective blobs, dust slowly collects together under gravity, feeding the developing star. These dark and dense stellar incubators are some of the chilliest objects in the universe at just 8 kelvin. The Rosette Nebula has enough raw material in the form of it’s gas and dust to make 10,000 stars, and no doubt their families of planets too.
The Herschel Space Observatory has the biggest mirror ever put into space at 3.5 metres wide, it is designed to see long wavelength radiation coming from the coldest and furthest objects in the universe.
