Astronomers have released an image of a vast filament of star-forming gas, 1,200 light-years away, in the stellar nursery of the Orion Nebula.
The image shows ammonia molecules within a 50-light-year long filament detected through radio observations made with the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. It accompanies the first release of results from a research collaboration published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
Astronomers have released an image of a vast filament of star-forming gas, 1,200 light-years away, in the stellar nursery of the Orion Nebula.
The image shows ammonia molecules within a 50-light-year long filament detected through radio observations made with the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. It accompanies the first release of results from a research collaboration published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
A team of researchers are collaborating on a survey of all the major, nearby star-forming regions in the northern half of the Gould Belt – a ring of young stars and gas clouds that circles the entire sky and runs through the constellation Orion. The researchers hope the survey will eventually provide a clearer picture over a larger portion of the sky of the temperatures and motions of gas within these dynamic stellar nurseries.
“We still don’t understand in detail how large clouds of gas in our galaxy collapse to form new stars,” says Rachel Friesen, one of the collaboration’s co-principal researchers who until recently was a fellow at U of T's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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Photo via University of Toronto.
