14 DAY TRIAL // Agglomerations of bright young stars that formed merely a few million years ago take center stage in a new space image obtained with the help of the La Silla Observatory in Chile and released by ESO astronomers this Wednesday.
The view focuses on the Prawn Nebula, otherwise known as Gum 56 after Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum or IC 4628 by its more official name.
The nebula, described as a humongous collection of gas clouds spanning about 250 light-years across and sprinkled with star clusters, is located at a distance of about 6,000 light-years from our planet, in the constellation of Scorpius.
The colorful image delivered by one of the telescopes at the La Silla Observatory does not show the Prawn Nebula in its entirety. Rather, it reveals just part of it.
As noted, the stars visible in this image are just a few million years old. This makes them quite young, especially when compared to our 4.6-billion-year-old Sun. The fiery orbs glow bright in ultraviolet and light up the nearby gas clouds.
“It is the light from these stars that causes the nebula’s gas clouds to glow. The radiation strips electrons from atoms - a process known as ionization - and when they recombine they release energy in the form of light,” ESO astronomers explain.
In case anyone was wondering, the reason the Prawn Nebula largely glows in a distinctive rich red is because it contains vast amounts of hydrogen.
Although it has been hard at work creating new stars for quite a while now, the nebula still holds enough material to birth many more such fiery orbs.
More so since, of the celestial bodies that have already formed in this region of space, many will perish in a few million years and seed the nebula with material that will go on to form new stars. In a way, this is kind of like cosmic recycling.
