The
Rosette Nebula in Hydrogen and Oxygen
From
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day
The
Rosette Nebula is not the only cosmic cloud of gas and dust to evoke the imagery of flowers -- but it is
the most famous.
At
the edge of a large molecular
cloud in Monoceros, some 5,000 light years away, the petals of this rose are actually a stellar
nursery whose lovely, symmetric shape is sculpted by the winds
and radiation from
its central cluster of hot
young stars.
The
stars in the energetic
cluster, cataloged as
NGC 2244, are only a few million years old, while the central cavity in the Rosette
Nebula, cataloged as NGC 2237, is about 50 light-years in
diameter.
The
nebula can be seen firsthand with
a small telescope toward the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros).
