#reflection nebula

Starlight Reflections - April 14th, 1998.

2006 August 8

Horse Head Shaped Reflection Nebula IC 4592

Credit & Copyright: Jim Misti and Steve Mazlin, (acquisition), Robert Gendler (processing)

See Explanation. Clicking on the picture will download the highest resolution version available.

Explanation: Do you see the horse's head? What you are seeing is not the famous Horsehead nebula toward Orion but rather a fainter nebula that only takes on a familiar form with deeper imaging. The main part of the above imaged molecular cloud complex is a reflection nebula cataloged as IC 4592. Reflection nebulas are actually made up of very fine dust that normally appears dark but can look quite blue when reflecting the light of energetic nearby stars. In this case, the source of much of the reflected light is a star at the eye of the horse. That star is part of Nu Scorpii, one of the brighter star systems toward the constellation of Scorpius. A second reflection nebula dubbed IC 4601 is visible surrounding two stars on the far right.

Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (USRA)

NASA Official: Jay Norris.

A service of: EUD at NASA / GSFC

JWST Views The Serpens Nebula

The Serpens nebula lies 1,300 light years from Earth and shows some amazing features.

At the top left, stars and protostars thought to be no older than 100,000 years create huge outflows along the poles, that burst out of the shroud of dust and gas and creating shockwaves as they hit interstellar material.

Then at the centre is the bat shadow, over the operation time of Hubble this has been seen to move, as the dust and gas cast a shadow in a slightly different area.

and finally, an area that looks like a eye with a star shining out, although it is thought that isn't what it actually is, rather layers of dust and gas at different densities giving the appearance of depth.