ASTRONOMY: Hubble Serves Up a Holiday Snow Angel

Hi My Friends: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 has captured this image of a giant cloud of hydrogen gas illuminated by a bright young star. The image shows how violent the end stages of the star-formation process can be, with the young object shaking up its stellar nursery.

This image shows Sh 2-106, or S106 for short. This is a compact star forming region in the constellation Cygnus (The Swan). A newly-formed star called S106 IR is shrouded in dust at the centre of the image, and is responsible for the the surrounding gas cloud’s hourglass-like shape and the turbulence visible within. Light from glowing hydrogen is coloured blue in this image. The image combines observations from the Hubble Space Telescope (in the centre) with images from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru Telescope to extend the field of view around the edges of the image.

Credits: NASA/ESA/the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)/NAOJ.

This picture, there is nothing peaceful about star forming region Sh 2-106, or S106 for short. A devilish young star, named S106 IR, lies in it and ejects material at high speed, which disrupts the gas and dust around it. The star has a mass about 15 times that of the Sun and is in the final stages of its formation. It will soon quieten down by entering the main sequence, the adult stage of stellar life.
For now, S106 IR remains embedded in its parent cloud, but it is rebelling against it. The material spewing off the star not only gives the cloud its hourglass shape but also makes the hydrogen gas in it very hot and turbulent. The resulting intricate patterns are clearly visible in this Hubble image. This image shows a ground-based telescope image of the region around star forming region Sh 2-106, or S106 for short. S106 is a compact star-forming region in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan). Credits: NASA/ESA/Digitized Sky Survey 2 (Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin).

The young star also heats up the surrounding gas, making it reach temperatures of 10 000 degrees Celsius. The star’s radiation ionises the hydrogen lobes, making them glow. The light from this glowing gas is coloured blue in this image.
Separating these regions of glowing gas is a cooler, thick lane of dust, appearing red in the image. This dark material almost completely hides the ionising star from view, but the young object can still be seen peeking through the widest part of the dust lane.
S106 was the 106th object to be catalogued by the astronomer Steward Sharpless in the 1950s. It is a few thousand light-years distant in the direction of Cygnus (The Swan). The cloud itself is relatively small by the standards of star-forming regions, around 2 light-years along its longest axis. This is about half the distance between the Sun and Proxima Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbour.

Hubble Serves Up a Holiday Snow Angel
The bipolar star-forming region, called Sharpless 2-106, looks like a soaring, celestial snow angel. The outstretched "wings" of the nebula record the contrasting imprint of heat and motion against the backdrop of a colder medium. Twin lobes of super-hot gas, glowing blue in this image, stretch outward from the central star. This hot gas creates the "wings" of our angel. A ring of dust and gas orbiting the star acts like a belt, cinching the expanding nebula into an "hourglass" shape.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
This composite picture was obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It results from the combination of two images taken in infrared light and one which is tuned to a specific wavelength of visible light emitted by excited hydrogen gas, known as H-alpha. This choice of wavelengths is ideal for targetting star-forming regions. The H-alpha filter isolates the light emitted from hydrogen in gas clouds while the infrared light can shine through the dust that often obscures these
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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