WISE image of the Elephant's Trunk Nebula. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team.
The stellar wind, that is! This beautiful image, taken by NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WISE) shows a vast ring of interstellar dust and gas being forced outwards by the wind and radiation from a massive star.
The star, HR8281, is located in the center of the image, the topmost star in a small triangular formation of blue stars to the upper left of the tip of a bright elongated structure ? the end of the “elephant trunk” that gives the nebula its name. The star may not look like much, but HR8281′s powerful stellar wind is what’s sculpting the huge cloud of dust into the beautiful shapes seen in this infrared image.
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Read the rest of Dust in the Wind (259 words)
© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2011. |
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Post tags: deep space, Elephant's Trunk, nebula, star formation, stellar wind, WISE
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