Science

Judi Lynn

(160,530 posts) Thu Feb 7, 2013, 08:40 AM Feb 2013

Seagull Nebula Spreads Cosmic Wings in Amazing Photos

Seagull Nebula Spreads Cosmic Wings in Amazing Photos

by Tariq Malik, SPACE.com Managing Editor

Date: 07 February 2013 Time: 06:00 AM ET

Eye-popping new images from a telescope in Chile reveal a new look at the Seagull Nebula soaring through a cosmic unicorn in the night sky.

The new nebula photos were released today (Feb. 6) by the European Southern Observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert. They show the Seagull Nebula as a wispy set of red glowing clouds amid dark black dust lanes and bright stars.

ESO officials released a stunning video tour of the Seagull Nebula in addition to the new photos.

http://www.space.com/19670-seagull-nebula-amazing-photos.html

2 replies

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Seagull Nebula Spreads Cosmic Wings in Amazing Photos (Original Post) Judi Lynn Feb 2013 OP

"stunning" is accurate demwing Feb 2013 #1

The wings of the Seagull Nebula Judi Lynn Feb 2013 #2

demwing

(16,916 posts)

1. "stunning" is accurate

Reply to Judi Lynn (Original post)

Sun Feb 10, 2013, 10:02 PM

Feb 2013

seeing this perspective of space makes me feel secure. In such a massive realm, each individual life is either equally significant, or equally insignificant. Either is better than the concept of an arbitrary, moral bias in the universe.

Judi Lynn

(160,530 posts)

2. The wings of the Seagull Nebula

Reply to Judi Lynn (Original post)

Mon Feb 11, 2013, 04:09 PM

Feb 2013

The wings of the Seagull Nebula
by Staff Writers
Munich, Germany (SPX) Feb 11, 2013

Running along the border between the constellations of Canis Major (The Great Dog) and Monoceros (The Unicorn) in the southern sky, the Seagull Nebula is a huge cloud mostly made of hydrogen gas. It's an example of what astronomers refer to as an HII region. Hot new stars form within these clouds and their intense ultraviolet radiation causes the surrounding gas to glow brightly.

The reddish hue in this image is a telltale sign of the presence of ionised hydrogen [1]. The Seagull Nebula, known more formally as IC 2177, is a complex object with a bird-like shape that is made up of three large clouds of gas - Sharpless 2-292 (eso1237) forms the "head", this new image shows part of Sharpless 2-296, which comprises the large "wings", and Sharpless 2-297 is a small, knotty addition to the tip of the gull's right "wing" [2].

These objects are all entries in the Sharpless nebula catalogue, a list of over 300 glowing clouds of gas compiled by American astronomer Stewart Sharpless in the 1950s. Before he published this catalogue Sharpless was a graduate student at the Yerkes Observatory near Chicago, USA, where he and his colleagues published observational work that helped to show that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with vast, curved arms.

Spiral galaxies can contain thousands of HII regions, almost all of which are concentrated along their spiral arms. The Seagull Nebula lies in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. But this is not the case for all galaxies; while irregular galaxies do contain HII regions, these are jumbled up throughout the galaxy, and elliptical galaxies are different yet again - appearing to lack these regions altogether. The presence of HII regions indicates that active star formation is still in progress in a galaxy.

More:
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/The_wings_of_the_Seagull_Nebula_999.html

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