High resolution image of Messier 43 taken with the 6.5 meter Magellan
telescope in Chile and the MMIRS, which sees into the near-infrared
spectrum.
Credit: Yuri Beletsky and Igor Chilingarian
Credit: Yuri Beletsky and Igor Chilingarian
Recently crowned the “astronomy photo of the year” by Slate’s Bad
Astronomy blog, a new image of a region of Orion’s belt reveals the
deepest look yet into this part of space by piercing through a cloudy
veil.
Composed by two astronomers, Igor Chilingarian, with the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., and Yuri Beletsky with
the Carnegie Observatories, who is also a well-known astrophotographer,
the dreamscape image resulted from what was only supposed to be a test
of a new instrument.
Mounted on the Magellan Clay Telescope at the Las Campanas
Observatory in Chile, the Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT) and Magellan
Infrared Spectrograph (MMIRS) is an advanced imaging and spectroscopic
tool that makes observations in infrared light. This means the camera is
not restricted to what can be seen by the human eye, but can penetrate
barriers like dust and clouds to reveal previously unseen detail.
Scheduling time with the telescope is difficult as it is in high
demand by astronomers from around the world. Yet finding themselves with
some precious extra hours, Chilingarian suggested they point the
instrument at an area of the sky that had previously yielded some
stunning space photos. Their target: two nebulae, M42 and M43, in the
sword of Orion’s Belt that are part of a notorious star-forming region.
The researchers weren’t planning on making a big scientific splash; they merely wanted to put the camera through its paces.
“We wanted to take some pretty pictures to attract attention to the instrument we have,” Chilingarian recalls. “We didn’t think there was any particular research that could be carried out with it. We were mainly concerned with how to make observations and calibrate the data to reach this level of detail.”
Focused on a patch of sky that from our earthbound perspective takes
up an area about half the size of the moon; MMIRS spent several hours
over two days in 2012 peering at an exceptionally dusty area of space in
the Orion Complex. This hotspot of star formation is hundreds of
light-years across, parts of which can be seen with the naked eye or a
good pair of binoculars. The complex holds nebulae, young stars and
discs of forming planets; as seen by the human eye in the visible
spectrum of light, these areas alternate between bright and dark zones.
The dark zones are areas where dust and gas–the stuff stars and
planets are made of–obscure visible light. But they are no barrier to an
infrared camera, which sees the hot clouds of gas as bright, hazy
swirls. The camera also captures starlight from beyond the complex,
revealing a glitzy panorama astronomers hadn’t seen before.
“You can see details that you can’t see with the Hubble space
telescope,” Chilingarian adds. “This is the deepest observation anyone
has ever made of the Orion star-forming region.”
With a bit of false coloration to distinguish the different
formations and temperature zones, Beletsky stitched together two images
into one cohesive mosaic, showing hot stars as white or blue, and cooler
zones in red and orange. A crimson stain shaped like a butterfly shows
jets of gas from protostellar objects—stars in the process of being
born.
“The image quality is really excellent,” Chilingarian says. “It’s a
bit worse than the resolution from Hubble, but among the best images you
can obtain from the ground. It’s the kind of picture that happens once
every two decades, and there’s a lot of noise in the community about
it.”
Ironically, the image went unnoticed by science for several years.
Prints adorned the walls of offices at Carnegie headquarters in
Pasadena, Calif., Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in
Massachusetts, and at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile–mere
decorations, until Beletsky decided to finish retouching the photo. He
submitted it to a popular online space photography board, NASA’s
Astronomy Picture of the Day, where it was immediately posted.
“My colleagues in Cambridge contacted me a few days later, amazed by
the quality of the image,” Chilingarian says. “We’d never used this
photo for any type of scientific research, but the people who work in
star formation were really excited about the dataset we collected along
with the observations we made to create this picture.”
MMIRS was moved back to the MMT Observatory at Mt. Hopkins, Arizona,
in March of 2015 after a five-year stint in Chile, and will begin making
its first scientific observations starting in September.
“We’ll probably get some more nice pictures like this, and we should get some good scientific data as well,” Chilingarian adds.
by Michelle Z. Donahue
Source: Smithsonian Science News
