Hubble stirs up cosmic brew

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Hubble stirs up cosmic brew
DR EMILY BALDWIN
ASTRONOMY NOW
Posted: 13 July 2010

The latest offering from the Hubble Space Telescope presents a swirling cosmic brew studded with blistering hot young stars.

This image of NGC 2467 was created using the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys and spans 3.5 arcminutes across. Image: NASA, ESA and Orsola De Marco (Macquarie University).

The star-forming region, NGC 2467, is awash with hydrogen gas from which it will serve up fresh new stars. Many of the youngest stars already present shine bright blue-white, while others remain cloaked in the thick dust and gas that permeates the nebula.

Fierce ultraviolet radiation streams from these young stellar giants, carving out exotic sculptures in the gas and lighting up the cloud in an eerie glow that has the effect of back-lighting dark, ominous-looking dust clouds.

A wide field view of the region around NGC 2467, spanning around three degrees across. Image: Digitized Sky Survey 2. Image: Davide De Martin.

Vast sums of radiation surge out from the prominent bright massive star near the centre of the image, which has stripped the immediate surrounds of gas, restricting the formation of new generations of stars to the denser regions around the periphery.

NGC 2467 lies around 13,000 light years from Earth. Studying these distant star-formation regions is important in understanding the chemical make-up of different galaxies throughout the Universe.

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