The Rosette Nebula: Key Features | Victor Blanco Telescope

The Rosette Nebula: Key Features | Victor Blanco Telescope

This excerpt shows some of the interesting features of the Rosette Nebula. The dashed circle highlights the nebula's central star cluster, NGC 2244. The hazy smudge at the center of NGC 2244 is the young stellar object (YSO), Rosette HH1 (1). YSOs are stars in their early stage of evolution, before they become main-sequence stars, that often exhibit characteristics, such as jets, bipolar outflows, protoplanetary discs, and other indicators of a new star being born. Around the nebula’s excavated nucleus is a string of dark clouds dubbed ‘elephant trunks,’ so-named because of their trunk-like pillars (2, 4) One of these dark features is the Wrench Trunk (3). Unlike the prototypical Pillars of Creation trunks that stand like straight columns, the Wrench’s ‘handle’ has an unusual spiral shape. It  traces the magnetic field of the nebula. This image was captured with the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a Program of the NSF NOIRLab.

Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA

Image Processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), D. de Martin & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)

Release Date: Oct. 1, 2024

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