Thursday 2 February 2017

SCIENCE | Adorable Kitten Toe Beans In Space!



Back in 1963, a tuxedo kitty from the streets of Paris, named FĂ©licette showed to the world that there just might be some relation between cats and space. Fifty- four years from then, The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has finally proved that cats and space do belong together!

The ESO, a 16-nation intergovernmental research organisation for ground-based astronomy, has recently released an image depicting some astounding cat toe beans in space. Cat people would already be familiar with what cat toe beans are. For those who haven't yet experienced kitty- love, they are those cute, spongy little pads on the underside of a cat's paw.

Anyway, there is, in space, a "Cat's Paw Nebula", which according to the ESO was first viewed by UK scientist John Herschel in the year 1837. Since then, human eyes have been blessed with a fuller view of the gorgeous paw in space.

But that's not the end of it. The ESO's latest images also feature the neighbouring Lobster Nebula. Like Cat's Paw, it is made up of vast gassy (mainly hydrogen) regions energised by the light of newborn stars. Both nebulae (officially named NGC 6334 and NGC 6357, which are 5,500 and 8,000 light years away, respectively) are found right near the tail of the constellation Scorpius. 

Here's the full image:

ESO


In an explanatory statement, the ESO stated that "with masses around 10 times that of the Sun, these hot stars radiate intense ultraviolet light. When this light encounters hydrogen atoms still lingering in the stellar nursery that produced the stars, the atoms become ionised. Accordingly, the vast, cloud-like objects that glow with this light from hydrogen (and other) atoms are known as emission nebulae."  

The new images come from the Very Large Telescope's 250-megapixel OmegaCAM, a successor to its impressive Wide Field Imager (WFI). "Despite the cutting-edge instruments used to observe these phenomena, the dust in these nebulae is so thick that much of their content remains hidden to us," the statement declares. 

"The Cat's Paw Nebula is one of the most active stellar nurseries in the night sky, nurturing thousands of young, hot stars whose visible light is unable to reach us. However, by observing at infrared wavelengths, telescopes such as ESO's VISTA can peer through the dust and reveal the star formation activity within," the statement further clarified.

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