H/T Lana Duze Sky View Sagittarius and The Lives of Stars. Here’s a beautiful deep look at a wide-field view of the Lagoon Nebula (M8, NGC 6523) and the Trifid Nebula (M20, NGC 6514) along with star cluster M21 and star forming region NGC6559. Image credit: Eugine Magnier (UH IfA), Peter Draper & Nigel Metcalfe (Durham University), ©PS1 Consortium. A single field from the worlds most powerful survey instrument Spitzer Space Telescope captures this spectacular skyview. Looking toward Sagittarius, the scene spans nearly 3 degrees or six times the width of the Full Moon. At bottom, upper right, and lower left it covers the Lagoon Nebula (M8), the Trifid Nebula (M20), and NGC 6559, in the crowded, dusty starfields of the central Milky Way. The adopted color scheme shows dust reddened starlight in red hues and normally red emission from hydrogen atoms in green. The Trifid Nebula is one of the youngest star-forming regions in the entire galaxy, as some of the stars in it may be just hundreds of thousands of years old. While most open clusters have somewhere around 1,000 stars in them, M21 has only about 57 stars. This is one of the youngest star clusters in the entire galaxy. The above image really brings out the color, and as you can see, it’s bright, blue stars that predominate in this cluster. Well, since we use the color-magnitude relation to determine how old the oldest surviving stars are in a cluster, we can figure out that this object is only 4.6 million years old. That’s just 10% the age of the Pleiades, the prototype for a “young open cluster,” and just 0.1% the age of the Sun!
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 11:12:39 +0000