GBO: GBT Captures Orion Blazing Bright in Radio Light

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Green Bank Telescope Captures Orion Blazing Bright in Radio Light
Green Bank Observatory | National Science Foundation | 2017 Jun 15

[img3="A ribbon of ammonia — a tracer of star-forming gas — in the Orion Nebula as seen with the GBT (orange). Background in blue is a WISE telescope infrared image showing the dust in the region. — Credit: R. Friesen, J. Pineda, et al; GBO/AUI/NSF"]http://www.dunlap.utoronto.ca/wp-conten ... _large.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]

A team of astronomers has unveiled a striking new image of the Orion Molecular Cloud (OMC) – a bustling stellar nursery teeming with bright, young stars and dazzling regions of hot, glowing gas.

The researchers used the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia to study a 50 light-year long filament of star-forming gas that is wending its way through the northern portion of the OMC known as Orion A.

The GBT rendered this image by detecting the faint radio signals naturally emitted by molecules of ammonia that suffuse interstellar clouds. Scientists study these molecules to trace the motion and temperature of vast swaths of star-forming gas.

These observations are part of the first data release from a large campaign known as the Green Bank Ammonia Survey. Its purpose is to map all the star-forming ammonia and other key tracer molecules in a massive structure known as the Gould Belt.

The Gould Belt is an extended ribbon of bright, massive stars stretching about 3,000 light-years in an arc across the sky. This first release covers four distinct Gould Belt clouds, one located in Taurus, one in Perseus, one in Ophiuchus, and Orion A North in Orion. ...

Radio Astronomers Peer Deep into the Stellar Nursery of the Orion Nebula
Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics | University of Toronto | 2017 Jun 15

The Green Bank Ammonia Survey (GAS): First Results of NH₃ mapping the Gould Belt - Rachel K. Friesen, Jaime E. Pineda et al

• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1704.06318 > 20 Apr 2017

[neufer]

<<In chemistry, nitrogen inversion is a fluxional process in compounds with a nitrogen atom that has a pyramidal geometry, such as ammonia (NH₃), whereby the molecule "turns inside out" 23.79 billion times a second. Ammonia exhibits a quantum tunnelling due to a narrow tunneling barrier, and not due to thermal excitation. Superposition of two states leads to the energy level splitting used in 23.79 GHz (1.26 cm) ammonia masers.>>

[b][color=#0000FF]The quantum tunneling inversion of ammonia was first detected by 23.79 GHz (1.26 cm) microwave spectroscopy in [size=150]1934[/size].[/color][/b]

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[b][color=#0000FF]Fritz Haber (9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934)[/color][/b]

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<<Fritz Haber (9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is of importance for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. The food production for half the world's current population depends on this method for producing nitrogen fertilizers.

Haber is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. Haber was on hand personally when it was first released by the German military at the Second Battle of Ypres (22 April to 25 May 1915) in Belgium. Future Nobel laureates James Franck, Gustav Hertz, and Otto Hahn served as gas troops in Haber's unit.

Haber defended gas warfare against accusations that it was inhumane, saying that death was death, by whatever means it was inflicted. During the 1920s, scientists working at his institute developed the cyanide gas formulation Zyklon A, which was used as an insecticide, especially as a fumigant in grain stores. Several members of Haber's extended family were to die in Nazi concentration camps, including his half-sister Frieda's daughter, Hilde Glücksmann, her husband, and their two children.

Ordered to dismiss all Jewish personnel in 1933, Haber attempted to delay their departures long enough to find them somewhere to go. Haber resignation as the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, in 1 October 1933. He said that although as a converted Jew he might be legally entitled to remain in his position, he no longer wished to do so. He accepted the directorship at the Sieff Research Institute in Palestine, but died of heart failure, mid-journey on 29 January 1934.

Haber's wife Clara was a women's rights activist and by some accounts, a pacifist. On 2 May 1915, following an argument with Haber, Clara committed suicide in their garden by shooting herself in the heart with his service revolver. She did not die immediately, and was found by her 12-year-old son, Hermann, who had heard the shots. Haber left within days for the Eastern Front to oversee gas release against the Russian Army. Hermann Haber lived in France until 1941. When Germany invaded France during World War II, Hermann and his wife and three daughters emigrated to the United States. Hermann's wife Margarethe died after the end of the war, and Hermann committed suicide in 1946. His oldest daughter, Claire, committed suicide in the late 1940s. Fritz Haber's other son, Ludwig Fritz Haber (1921–2004), became an eminent British economist and wrote a history of chemical warfare in World War I,The Poisonous Cloud (1986).>>