RCW120

Sfavillante Nursery Stellare

Colour composite image of RCW120. It reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps where new stars are then formed. The 870-micron submillimetre-wavelength data were taken with the LABOCA camera on the 12-m Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope. Here, the submillimetre emission is shown as the blue clouds surrounding the reddish glow of the ionised gas (shown with data from the SuperCosmos H-alpha survey). The image also contains data from the Second Generation Digitized Sky Survey (I-band shown in blue, R-band shown in red). This image is available as a mounted image in the ESOshop

Questa strepitosa immagine del telescopio APEX (Atacama Pathfinder Experiment) dell’ESO dimostra il potere dell’astronomia submillimetrica. È una splendida bolla in espansione di gas ionizzato che si estende per una decina di anni luce e provoca il collasso del materiale circostante in grumi densi, luogo di nascita di nuove stelle. Continua a leggere