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> Nebula IRAS 05437+2502

Nebula IRAS 05437+2502

author: Nasa/ESA/Novapix

reference: a-neb94-01001

Image Size 300 DPI: 17 * 14 cm

The little-known nebula IRAS 05437+2502 billows out among the bright stars and dark dust clouds that surround it in this striking image from the Hubble Space Telescope. It is located in the constellation of Taurus (the Bull), close to the central plane of our Milky Way galaxy. It appears to be a small, rather isolated, region of star formation and one might assume that the effects of fierce ultraviolet radiation from bright young stars probably were the cause of the eye-catching shapes of the gas. However, the bright boomerang-shaped feature may tell a more dramatic tale. The interaction of a high velocity young star and the cloud of gas and dust may have created this unusually sharp-edged bright arc. Such a reckless star would have been ejected from the distant young cluster where it was born and would travel at 200 000 km/hour or more through the nebula. This faint cloud was originally discovered in 1983 by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), the first space telescope to survey the whole sky in the infrared. This image was taken with the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys on Hubble. The exposure times were about eleven minutes per filter and the field of view is about 100 arcseconds across.

Keywords for this photo:

2010 - ASTRONOMY - HST - HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE - IRAS 05437+2502 - NEBULA - STAR - TAURUS -