‘Galactic Ghoul’ Rears Its Spooky Head
JPL — A "monster" lurking behind a blanket of cosmic dust is unveiled in this new Halloween image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Resembling a ghoul with two hollow eyes and a screaming mouth, this masked cloud of newborn stars was uncovered by Spitzer’s heat-seeking infrared eyes.
The spooky cloud — a nebula called "DR 6" residing in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy — is home to a cluster of about 10 massive newborn stars, ranging in size from 10 to 20 times the mass of our Sun. The nebular "eyes" and "mouth" were carved out by intense heat and winds, which shoot outward from the stars (located in the central bar or "nose"). The green material remaining in the eyes and mouth is comprised of gas, while the red regions and tendrils beyond make up the dusty cloud that originally gave birth to the young stars.
Within the nebula’s nose, a second generation of stars is in the process of forming. These stars, in turn, will sculpt their stellar nursery, and ultimately affect the birth of yet another generation of stars. Spitzer provides astronomers with an unprecedented combination of sensitivity and spatial resolution to study this cycle in detail.
DR 6 is located 3,900 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The distance from one end of its central bar to the other is the about 3.5 light-years, or about the same distance from our Sun to its nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri.
This image composite was taken on Nov. 27, 2003, by Spitzer’s infrared array camera. It is composed of images obtained at four wavelengths: 3.6 microns (blue), 4.5 microns (green), 5.8 microns (orange) and 8 microns (red).
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‘Galactic Ghoul’ Rears Its Spooky Head
About the Spitzer Space Telescope
The Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly SIRTF, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility) was launched into space by a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 25 August 2003. During its 2.5-year mission, Spitzer will obtain images and spectra by detecting the infrared energy, or heat, radiated by objects in space between wavelengths of 3 and 180 microns (1 micron is one-millionth of a meter). Most of this infrared radiation is blocked by the Earth’s atmosphere and cannot be observed from the ground.
Consisting of a 0.85-meter telescope and three cryogenically-cooled science instruments, Spitzer is the largest infrared telescope ever launched into space. Its highly sensitive instruments give us a unique view of the Universe and allow us to peer into regions of space which are hidden from optical telescopes.
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