Starship Asterisk*

The Cone Nebula from Hubble

Explanation: Stars are forming in the gigantic dust pillar called the Cone Nebula. Cones, pillars, and majestic flowing shapes abound in stellar nurseries where natal clouds of gas and dust are buffeted by energetic winds from newborn stars. The Cone Nebula, a well-known example, lies within the bright galactic star-forming region NGC 2264. The Cone was captured in unprecedented detail in this close-up composite of several observations from the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. While the Cone Nebula, about 2,500 light-years away in Monoceros, is around 7 light-years long, the region pictured here surrounding the cone's blunted head is a mere 2.5 light-years across. In our neck of the galaxy that distance is just over half way from the Sun to its nearest stellar neighbor, the Alpha Centauri star system. The massive star NGC 2264 IRS, seen by Hubble's infrared camera in 1997, is the likely source of the wind sculpting the Cone Nebula and lies off the top of the image. The Cone Nebula's reddish veil is produced by glowing hydrogen gas.

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Here are the filters isolated. It's interesting to compare the infrared and H-alpha data. The H-alpha looks kind of like a fog surrounding the cone.

Good job, Gecko!

Hubble Never Disappoints....it is always awesome!! Wow...the swirls and detail.

Looks like a B Grade Syfy movie....."The Shambling Menace from Space".....

:---[===] *

That's Cousin Itt from the Addams Family!

Great image Geck. The smallest light source in the nebula, toward the left in the upper bottom third of the image, appears to have a bright jet and dark accretion disk surrounding it. Is this an optical illusion?

Nice work Geck! Today's APOD, its discussion and links were especially well done. As almost every day they provide an encyclopedia's worth of knowledge for one willing to look and explore the vast wealth of understanding of our existence in the universe. Thanks to all the staff for you daily effort!! Ron

FloridaMike wrote:Great image Geck. The smallest light source in the nebula, toward the left in the upper bottom third of the image, appears to have a bright jet and dark accretion disk surrounding it. Is this an optical illusion?

That does look like a jet but there is no accretion disk The dark streak you see crossing that area is just an incidental cloud structure. Accretion disks are never resolved, even to Hubble. They're just too small for that. The ones around black holes in active galaxy nuclei are the brightest things in the Universe so we can see them but they are point sources. Typically those objects do have dusty donuts around them, though. It's really fun to find those young stars in Hubble's data. That is just one which happens to be close enough to the periphery of the cone for the jet to push out of it. That particular jet is not studied that I have found and is listed in SIMBAD as nothing more than a catalog entry.

geckzilla wrote:Accretion disks are never resolved, even to Hubble.

Almost always true.

And protoplanetary discs are a form of accretion disc, and these have been resolved by Hubble- and if we were to see an accretion disc in the Cone, that's what it would most likely be. (I agree that the feature pointed out isn't one, however.)

Funny, I've searched in the past for such a picture and either forgot that I saw that or never managed to find it. And it does say right in the Wikipedia article that a proplyd may be considered an accretion disk... kind of ambiguous to call it one, though. Obviously they are similar but the differences are substantial enough. I mean, you could try to call a spiral galaxy an accretion disk on some weird level. Where do you draw the line?

geckzilla wrote:Funny, I've searched in the past for such a picture and either forgot that I saw that or never managed to find it. And it does say right in the Wikipedia article that a proplyd may be considered an accretion disk... kind of ambiguous to call it one, though. Obviously they are similar but the differences are substantial enough. I mean, you could try to call a spiral galaxy an accretion disk on some weird level. Where do you draw the line?

An accretion disc is a gravitationally driven structure where fluid dynamics plays a significant role. The physics of what's happening in the accretion disc around a black hole is pretty much the same as what's happening in a protoplanetary disc.

A galaxy is like a solar system: multiple independent bodies in their own orbits. They may interact gravitationally, but not by any fluid dynamic processes. Basically, the amount of material in a galaxy that is interacting by collisions is too small to have much impact on the structure of that galaxy.

Ron-Astro Pharmacist wrote:Nice work Geck! Today's APOD, its discussion and links were especially well done. As almost every day they provide an encyclopedia's worth of knowledge for one willing to look and explore the vast wealth of understanding of our existence in the universe. Thanks to all the staff for you daily effort!! Ron

Well said and agree.

According to the filter views posted by Geck, the cyan veils are caused by H-alpha. It would be red if the image were in true color (and if our cone cells were sensitive enough), but that is not the image that is posted.

Sure, H-alpha is red. This image contains infrared data, as well. So this caused the H-alpha to get bumped down to green. This is an image you might see if our eyes could see infrared, which I am much more interested in than the paltry spectrum of light we see naturally.

geckzilla wrote:
Sure, H-alpha is red. This image contains infrared data, as well.
So this caused the H-alpha to get bumped down to green.

• This caused the H-alpha to get bumped UP to green:

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared wrote:
<<The word infrared means below red. It comes from the Latin word infra (meaning below)
and the English word red. (Infrared light has a frequency below the frequency of red light.)>>

geckzilla wrote:
This is an image you might see if our eyes could see infrared, which
I am much more interested in than the paltry spectrum of light we see naturally.

• Paltry, a. [Gr. vile, and to fail.] Ragged; mean; vile; worthless; despicable.

http://www.mapoflife.org/topics/topic_311_Infrared-detection-in-animals/ wrote:
<<Blood-sucking bed bugs [use infrared perception] to help locate their 'prey' using a cave-like organ situated on the antennae.

A parasitoid braconid wasp possesses an antennal sensillum that acts as an infrared wave-guide for finding a potential host.

Three species [of beetles] (Melanophila acuminata, Merimna atrata & Acanthocnemus nigricans) have been shown to use [infrared perception] for the detection of forest fires [in order] to lay their eggs in newly burnt wood.

More at: http://www.mapoflife.org/topics/topic_3 ... n-animals/>>

neufer wrote:

geckzilla wrote:
Sure, H-alpha is red. This image contains infrared data, as well.
So this caused the H-alpha to get bumped down to green.

• This caused the H-alpha to get bumped UP to green:

Yeah, up in energy. Down in my layer order. Photoshop for some reason lists red on top and blue on the bottom. Maybe it should have been called BGR instead of RGB the whole time.

neufer wrote:This caused the H-alpha to get bumped UP to green:

Bumped up in frequency. Bumped down in wavelength. Maybe we should just settle for "bumped" with no modifying preposition at all.

We generally represent red at the top of the list (e.g. RGB) or the left in a spectrum. In either case, "down" is what most people picture in going from red to green.

Chris wrote:
We generally represent red at the top of the list (e.g. RGB) or the left in a spectrum.

We do?

Ann

Well, we read a rainbow from top to bottom. Maybe that started the whole thing with red being first and blue being last.

Ann wrote:

Chris wrote:
We generally represent red at the top of the list (e.g. RGB) or the left in a spectrum.

We do?

Ann

Generally. I don't know how kids in Sweden learn about spectra and rainbows, but here, most everybody knows of Roy G Biv.

I've never heard of Roy G. Biv., but I'm assuming it's a name for kids to remember RGB.

Beyond wrote:I've never heard of Roy G. Biv., but I'm assuming it's a name for kids to remember RGB.

Maybe you went to school before Newton?

Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet

I learnt it this way: Richard Of York Goes Boating In Venice.

I was also taught that Newton (who was supposedly the first to arbitrarily divide the spectrum into the seven colours above, for reasons steeped in ancient mysticism) considered Blue to be closer to what we would call Cyan (or Sky Blue) today, and considered Indigo closer to what we would call (Deep) Blue today.

Chris Peterson wrote:

Beyond wrote:I've never heard of Roy G. Biv., but I'm assuming it's a name for kids to remember RGB.

Maybe you went to school before Newton?

Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet

Ah, had to wait a while to remember it, you mean Sir Isaac Newton, right?
Nope, I went to school a long time after he graduated the planet. I went to a technical school to be an electrician. We didn't bother with colors all that much, mostly just black, white and red, unless we were doing something with resistors.