Radiation and winds from massive stars have
blown a cavity into the surrounding dust and gas, creating the Trifid
nebula, as seen here in infrared light by NASA's Wide-field Infrared
Survey Explorer, or WISE. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA. Larger image
A storm of stars is brewing in the Trifid nebula, as seen in this
view from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The
stellar nursery, where baby stars are bursting into being, is the
yellow-and-orange object dominating the picture. Yellow bars in the
nebula appear to cut a cavity into three sections, hence the name Trifid
nebula.
Colors in this image represent different wavelengths of infrared
light detected by WISE. The main green cloud is made up of hydrogen gas.
Within this cloud is the Trifid nebula, where radiation and winds from
massive stars have blown a cavity into the surrounding dust and gas, and
presumably triggered the birth of new generations of stars. Dust glows
in infrared light, so the three lines that make up the Trifid, while
appearing dark in visible-light views, are bright when seen by WISE.
The blue stars scattered around the picture are older, and they lie
between Earth and the Trifid nebula. The baby stars in the Trifid will
eventually look similar to those foreground stars. The red cloud at
upper right is gas heated by a group of very young stars.
The Trifid nebula is located 5,400 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.
Blue represents light emitted at 3.4-micron wavelengths, and cyan
(blue-green) represents 4.6 microns, both of which come mainly from hot
stars. Relatively cooler objects, such as the dust of the nebula, appear
green and red. Green represents 12-micron light and red, 22-micron
light.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages and
operates the recently activated NEOWISE asteroid-hunting mission for
NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The results presented here are from
the WISE all-sky survey mission, which operated before NEOWISE, using
the same spacecraft, in 2010 and 2011. WISE was selected competitively
under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the agency's Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the
Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. The spacecraft was built by
Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science
operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and
Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov
