Astronomers have obtained the highest resolution of infrared images near the Kerina Nebula, a thick cloud of dust and gas in which stars are actively forming.
Gemini in Chile is incredible to see the newly obtained images obtained from the South Telescope. It’s also useful for understanding stellar nurseries and stellar births, and a preview of what kind of images we can expect when the James Webb Web Space Telescope finally takes to the skies.
“The results are amazing,” said Patrick Hartigan, a physicist and astronomer at Rice University.
“We are seeing a wealth of detail never seen before along the edge of a cloud, including a long range of parallel gesalas produced by a magnetic field, with significant almost perfect smooth sine waves and fragments at the top. The process of laying. “
The birth of stars is an interesting process, but it can’t happen anywhere. You need a ga thick cloud of gas and dust, it is rich in atomic hydrogen and therefore ga ense, it includes fields that fall under their own mass of gravity.
As those nodes break, their rotation expands under the protection of angular velocity. This creates a rotating disk of physical eating in the protostar (and which can eventually form planets after the star formation process is complete).
Therefore, the best sites of star formation are gast and obscure. These interstellar clouds appear opaque, like a dark voce against a shining background of stars in intertical wavelengths. Which makes them a little Achilles heel for the Hubble Space Telescope.
Hubble said Hubble operates on optical and ultraviolet wavelengths that are blocked by dust in areas such as stars.
But light in infrared and near-infrared wavelengths can penetrate thick dust, allowing astronomers to see inside these enigmatic clouds. In the same place tools like Gemini South have an advantage over Hubble. But they also have a disadvantage. Hubble is in space. Gemini is on Earth, south of our planet’s atmosphere bubble.
Atmospheric storms distort and scatter light from a distance – which is why the stars twinkle when you look at the night sky. It is a problem for ground-based astronomy, and over the years, various techniques have been used to improve it.
It was at first that after the observations had already been taken, the distorted effects had to be removed when the images were processed. Moving forward in technology, we have approved what we call adaptive optics, which improve atmospheric instability as observations are ongoing.
The Gemini South Adaptive Optics Imager has five lasers; Beams are made in the sky to project these artificial “guide stars” that are measured to improve the effect of atmospheric storms.
Using this technique, Hartigan and his team were able to capture images of the Carina Nebula at 10 times higher resolution than images taken without adaptive optics, and twice as fast as Hubble images at this wavelength. And new details of the interaction between the dust and gas cloud in the images and the clusters of small and large stars nearby have come out.
Part of the cloud is known as the western wall, and the radiation erupting from the hot young stars is ionizing hydrogen, causing it to glow with infrared light. Ultraviolet radiation from stars is also causing the outer layer of hydrogen to evaporate.
Using different filters, the team was able to obtain separate images of cloud surfaces and evaporating hydrogen.
“This field is probably the best example in the sky of irradiated interfaces,” Hertig said. “These new images are sharper than anything we’ve seen before. They give a clearer view to date of how the giant stars affect the area around them and how they affect the formation of constellations and planets.”
The James Webb Web Space Telescope, when it launches over a period of about a year (Touchwood), will be observed primarily in infrared and near-infrared; So the researchers said the image is a bit of a glimpse that we can expect to see in the future.
But it also reveals the power of adaptive optics as a complement to the abilities to observe or observe.
“Structures like the Western Wall will be a rich hunting ground for both web and ground based telescopes with adaptive optics like the Gemini South.” “Each will pierce the dust buds and reveal new information about the birth of the stars.”
You can download the high-resolution version of the image here. Research has been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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