April 21, 2004
The same gravity that holds galaxies together and keeps planets in their orbits also held you to the Earth on the day you were born.
Nebulas Surrounding Wolf-Rayet Binary BAT99-49
Birthday · April 21, 2004
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APOD published April 21, 2004. Credit: Y. Naze, G. Rauw, J. Manfroid, J. Vreux (Univ. Liege), Y. Chu (Univ. Illinois), ESO. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
How could two young stars power these colorful interstellar gas clouds? Although hidden by thick dust, the stars spew forceful ions and energetic radiation that cause the clouds to fragment and light up. The above composite color image from the European Southern Observatory's Melipal VLT telescope resolves details in the nebula complex known as BAT99-49, with emission from helium atoms in blue hues, oxygen atoms in green, and hydrogen atoms in red. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the largest satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy, one of the stars in the central binary is an enigmatic Wolf-Rayet star while the other is a massive O star. Wolf-Rayet stars have some of the hottest surfaces in the universe, while O stars are the most massive and energetic of normal main sequence stars.
Image credit: Y. Naze, G. Rauw, J. Manfroid, J. Vreux (Univ. Liege), Y. Chu (Univ. Illinois), ESO