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"X-ray Champagne Flow" Uncorked in Horseshoe Nebula

Posted on: Friday, 15 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Chandra X-Ray Observatory -- The Chandra image reveals hot gas flowing away from massive young stars in the center of the Horseshoe Nebula, a.k.a. M17, a.k.a. the Omega Nebula.

The gas temperatures range from 1.5 million degrees Celsius (2.7 million degrees Fahrenheit) to about 7 million degrees Celsius (13 million degrees F).

A group of massive young stars responsible for the activity in the nebula is located in the bright pink region near the center of the image.

Chandra's resolving power enabled astronomers to separate the contribution from these and other stars in the nebula from the diffuse emission.

An infrared image of the Horseshoe Nebula reveals a cloud of much cooler gas and dust shaped like a horseshoe that gives the nebula its name.

The hot gas shown by the Chandra image fits inside the cool gas cloud, and appears to have formed the horseshoe shape by carving a cavity in the cool gas. This activity could lead to the formation of new stars in the Horseshoe.

The stars in the Horseshoe Nebula are only about a million years old, so the nebula is too young for one of its stars to have exploded as a supernova and heated the gas.

Collisions between high-speed winds of particles flowing away from the massive stars could heat the gas, or the hot gas could be produced as these winds collide with cool clouds to form bubbles of hot gas.

This hot gas appears to be flowing out of the Horseshoe like champagne flows out of a bottle when the cork is removed, so it has been termed an "X-ray champagne flow."

A comparison with other young star clusters confirms that massive young stars are responsible for hot gas clouds like the one seen in the Horseshoe Nebula.

The Arches cluster, which contains many massive young stars shows this type of cloud, whereas the central regions of the Orion Nebula, which has few massive young stars, does not.

This version of Chandra's observation of M17 has been processed to emphasize the diffuse emission in the cluster. (Credit: NASA/CXC/PSU/L.Townsley et al.)

This infrared image of M17 from the 2MASS project penetrates the the dust in this nebular to reveal the otherwise invisible dark molecular cloud. (Credit: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF)

The radio image of M17 depicts the distribution of ionized hydrogen (hydrogen atoms with their electrons stripped away) in what astronomers refer to as "HII regions". (Credit: NRAO/AUI)

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NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. Chandra is designed to observe X-rays from high-energy regions of the universe, such as the remnants of exploded stars.

The Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and staffed by personnel from SAO, MIT, and NGST. Dr. Harvey Tananbaum is the Center's director.

Science Support is responsible for the mission planning and science operations. The Operations Control Center directs the flight and executes the observing plan of the observatory, and receives the scientific data from the observatory.

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