14 DAY TRIAL // Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is widely regarded as cosmic structure that has lost its ability to produce young, blue stars at very high rates, and over short periods of time. However, this doesn't seem to be entirely true, as evidenced recently by an amazing set of observations of the stellar nursery known as the Cat's Paw Nebula. Known among astronomers and astrophysicists as NGC 6334, the object is producing new stars at a furious pace, and it will most likely continue to do so over millions of years to come, Space reports.
Like most stellar nurseries, the Cat's Paw contains vast reserves of cosmic dust and gas, inside huge clouds. As these clouds accumulate more and more mass, they eventually collapse under their own weight in a space several orders of magnitude smaller than their original size, and ignite, forming new stars. The recently-observed nebula has apparently been at it for some time now, as tens of thousands of stars have thus far been identified within. Most of the blue stars it contains are younger than 10 million years, and are, on average, 10 times more massive than our own Sun. However, the nursery also contains older and redder stars, that it created hundreds of millions of years ago.
“NGC 6334 is one of the most active nurseries of massive stars in our galaxy,” explained recently in a press release experts at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The new images were snapped using the Chile-based 2.2-meter MPG/ESO telescope, at the La Silla Observatory. Most noticeably, the Wide Field Imager instrument provided the most accurate details, as engineers at the facility used several color filters (for red, green and blue light) to compile the new photos, in addition to data collected via special, hydrogen glow-sensitive filters. The level of detail evident in these photographs is not possible from observations conducted in a single wavelength, or with only one filter, the team adds.
“The nebula appears red because its blue and green light are scattered and absorbed more efficiently by material between the nebula and Earth. The red light comes predominantly from hydrogen gas glowing under the intense glare of hot young stars,” the ESO group reveals. According to previous measurements, the Cat's Paw Nebula has a diameter of about 50 light-years from extremity to extremity, and is located in the direction of the southern constellation Scorpius, towards the center of the Milky Way, at a distance of roughly 5,500 light-years from our solar system.