Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Tan (Chalmers University of Technology); Processing; Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America).
The Prawn Nebula is a massive stellar nursery located in the constellation Scorpius, about 6,000 light years from Earth. Though the nebula stretches 250 light-years and covers a space four times the size of the full moon, it discharges light mainly in wavelengths the human eye can not discover, making it exceptionally faint to earthbound audiences. Hubbles look, however, shows a small section of the nebula here in both visible and unnoticeable infrared light, capturing dazzling detail of the nebulas structure, consisting of bright locations of glowing gas.
The Prawn Nebula, also called IC 4628, is an emission nebula, which suggests its gas has been energized, or ionized, by the radiation of close-by stars. The radiation from these massive stars strips electrons from the nebulas hydrogen atoms. As the stimulated electrons revert from their higher-energy state to a lower-energy state by recombining with hydrogen nuclei, they produce energy in the kind of light, triggering the nebulas gas to glow. In this image, red indicates the existence of ionized iron (Fe II) emission.
The Prawn Nebula lies south of the star Antares in the constellation Scorpius, the Scorpion. Hubbles focused view catches simply a small portion of the huge star-forming region. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Tan (Chalmers University of Technology), and ESO; Processing; Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America).
This Hubble Space Telescope image was captured as part of a survey of huge- and intermediate-size “protostars,” or recently forming stars. Astronomers utilized the infrared sensitivity of Hubbles Wide Field Camera 3 to search for hydrogen ionized by ultraviolet light ionized by the protostars, jets from the stars, and other functions.
