Thursday, January 12, 2012

Pacman nebula

     It is slightly larger than the field of view, but I know that the hard-core gamers out there immediately saw the Pacman :)

     NGC 281, it's other cool name, is a region in the Perseus spiral arm of our galaxy where Hydrogen got excited with the presence of so many bright stars in and around it. These are part of a very young open cluster and after some time more and more stars will form, eventually consuming and dispersing all the available material for star-making factories like the Pacman.

     The black, small, condensed areas are called Bok globules and have a few solar masses of material in a region of about one light year: this is a place where it is thought that star formation takes place. 



No comments:

Post a Comment