Space Swoon: NGC 7129 is a gorgeous Reflection (Nebula)
NGC 7129 is a fascinating and terribly lovely object. It’s a stellar nursery, a site of active star formation, buried deep within an invisible cloud of very cold molecular gas and dust. Luckily for us, a handful of massive stars were born near the edge of this cloud, carving a blister in its side and exposing their fierce light and beauty to us.
Holy wow! That image is a combination of observations using the giant 10-meter Subaru telescope, the 0.81 meter Schulman Telescope (from my old friend Adam Block), and a 35 cm telescope, all of which were processed by Robert Gendler and Roberto Colombari.
It’s a spectacular photo to be sure, but there’s a lot of science in it, as well as a surprise.
Remember, what you’re seeing is a small part of a much larger complex of gas and dust, with only this local volume illuminated by the stars within. The brightest, most massive stars being born there are blue, and the blue glow you see is light reflected and scattered by grains of dust, so we call it a reflection nebula. That’s a sure sign you’re seeing young stars; blue stars don’t live long, so they must be young, and the regions where they’re born are typically choked with thick dust clouds.
Some of the dust is so thick it blocks the light coming from behind it, which is why there’s a collar of blackness on the lower left side of NGC 7129, separating the main nebula from the circular blue reflective patch caused by another star. The young stars—only a few million years old at most, a tiny fraction of the Sun’s 4.5 billion year age!—can also focus twin beams of matter blasting outward from their poles as they form. This slams into the material around them, forming those small curved arcs you can see here and there in the nebula. Those are like the bow waves coming off ships as they ply the ocean.
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