The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released an latest image of the Flame Nebula in the constellation Orion. This is based on observations made by astronomer Thomas Stanke and his team a few years ago. Astronomers are very excited about this: "Every time a new telescope or instrument is observed in Orion, there is always a new and interesting discovery!" ”
Flame Nebula drawn by APEX (Source: ESO/Th. Stanke)
The Flame Nebula is no stranger to many enthusiasts. Numbered 2024 in the NGC catalogue, it is between about 1300 and 1600 light-years away and is the famous emission nebula within the constellation Orion. It is located near the easternmost star on the belt of The orion, and the standard name of this star is the ζ star of Orion, Chinese because of the name of Betelgeuse, or the "Lu" star of the three stars of "Fu, Lu, and Shou". It is actually a triad, the main star is an O-shaped blue supergiant, with a surface temperature of nearly 30,000 kai and a diameter of more than 20 times that of the Sun. Betelgeuse is unusually ferocious and active, shooting high-energy ultraviolet light into the nebula of flames, knocking electrons out of the huge cloud of hydrogen. When electrons and ionized hydrogen are recombined, many glows are produced. This is called the Launch Nebula.
However, some of the extra darker or cooler gas dust happens to be located between the nebula and the Earth, so we will see some dark stripes in front of the nebula, which we call dark nebulae. This situation is actually similar to our usual backlight photography, in the powerful light as the background, the person looks just a silhouette. Next to the Flame Nebula, there is a very famous dark nebula, the Horsehead Nebula.
Flame Nebula and Horsehead Nebula (Source: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2)
The Flame Nebula is part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, a star-forming region. Therefore, this area has attracted the attention of many astronomers. Observation equipment in many electromagnetic bands, including X-rays, ultraviolet, infrared and so on, has taken pictures or mapped it.
Stanco's team excitedly tried to install a super camera on the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) and point it at the Flaming Nebula. These observations were made as part of the "Alcohol" project (this is another piece of acronym ALCOHOLS, full name APEX Large CO Heterodyne Orion Legacy Survey, Chinese translated as "APEX Large Carbon Monoxide Heterodyne Orion Legacy Survey Project"). The so-called "heterodyne method" is a radio interferometry method that can effectively improve the accuracy of interferometry by mixing two waves of different frequencies to generate new frequencies. The project mainly tracks the radio waves emitted by carbon monoxide (CO) in the Orion cloud, probing the vast sky through tracers to map large clouds of gas that produce new stars. Obviously, this approach gives us more details that are very different from ordinary visible lighting films. It should be noted that the "flame" shown in this image is actually some relatively cold clouds, and the temperature is usually only a few tens of degrees higher than absolute zero!
Flame nebula and horsehead nebula stitched with visible light (background) and radio bands (rectangular box) (Source: ESO/Th. Stanke & ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2)
After several observations, Stanco and his team published the results in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. In addition to the Flame Nebula and its surroundings, they also observed other targets, such as the Ultraman Homeland M78 Nebula and NGC 2071, which are made up of interstellar gas and dust clouds that reflect the light of nearby stars (known as reflective nebulae). Astronomers expect Orion to bring us more hidden messages.
Resources:
Orion’s fireplace: ESO releases new image of the Flame Nebula
(https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2201/)
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