APOD: Spitzer's Trifid (2020 Feb 13)

[APOD Robot]

Spitzer's Trifid

Explanation: The Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope. About 30 light-years across and 5,500 light-years distant it's a popular stop for cosmic tourists in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. As its name suggests, visible light pictures show the nebula divided into three parts by dark, obscuring dust lanes. But this penetrating infrared image reveals the Trifid's filaments of glowing dust clouds and newborn stars. The spectacular false-color view is courtesy of the Spitzer Space Telescope. Astronomers have used the infrared image data to count newborn and embryonic stars which otherwise can lie hidden in the natal dust and gas clouds of this intriguing stellar nursery. Launched in 2003, Spitzer explored the infrared Universe from an Earth-trailing solar orbit until its science operations were brought to a close earlier this year, on January 30.

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[Boomer12k]

Awesome and Mysterious looking...

My M20 close up...I have been trying to match them up...OK...I have adjusted my image to match the APOD...On the left...you see that "hump" pointing inward???

In the APOD that is that little "nib" pointing into the center...it looks kind of like the "beak" of a Turkey or some bird...


But we don't want it to be..."Day of the Trifids"....
:---[===] *

[orin stepanek]

Very nice photo!

[neufer]

The First Light image from CHEOPS shows stars out of focus, distorted into triangle shapes by the telescope optics. Credit: ESA/Airbus/Mission Consortium

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<<The Day of the Triffids is a 1951 post-apocalyptic novel by the English science fiction author John Wyndham. After most people in the world are blinded by an apparent meteor shower, an aggressive species of plant starts killing people. The protagonist is Bill Masen, a biologist who has made his living working with triffids—tall, venomous, carnivorous plants capable of locomotion. Due to his background, Masen suspects they were bioengineered in the U.S.S.R. and accidentally released into the wild. Because of the excellent industrial quality of an oil produced by and obtained from the triffids, the result is triffid cultivation around the world.>>

viewtopic.php?f=31&t=29880&p=299404#p299404

[Ann]

This image composite compares the well-known visible-light picture of the glowing Trifid Nebula (left panel) with an infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The false-color Spitzer image reveals a different side of the Trifid Nebula. Where dark lanes of dust are visible trisecting the nebula in the visible-light picture, bright regions of star-forming activity are seen in the Spitzer pictures. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

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It's interesting to compare a visible-light image of the Trifid Nebula with Spitzer's infrared one. Note how one of the dark dust lanes of the Trifid appears in the infrared. There is what looks like a big yellow "egg", bisected by a wiggly dark line, in a position where a visible light image only shows us a dark dust lane.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote:

The Trifid Nebula is a giant star-forming cloud of gas and dust located 5,400 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Previous images taken by the Institute for Radioastronomy millimeter telescope in Spain show that the nebula contains four cold knots, or cores, of dust. Such cores are "incubators" where stars are born. Astronomers thought the ones in the Trifid Nebula were not yet ripe for stars. But, when Spitzer set its infrared eyes on all four cores, it found that they had already begun to develop warm stellar embryos.

Ann

[dlw]

There are quite a few stars that appear to be surrounded by something red. Is this an illusion created by the optics or something real?

[neufer]

This image composite compares the well-known visible-light picture of the glowing Trifid Nebula (left panel) with an infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The false-color Spitzer image reveals a different side of the Trifid Nebula. Where dark lanes of dust are visible trisecting the nebula in the visible-light picture, bright regions of star-forming activity are seen in the Spitzer pictures. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

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It's interesting to compare a visible-light image of the Trifid Nebula with Spitzer's infrared one. Note how one of the dark dust lanes of the Trifid appears in the infrared. There is what looks like a big yellow "egg", bisected by a wiggly dark line, in a position where a visible light image only shows us a dark dust lane.

wiggle (v.) early 13c., perhaps from Middle Dutch, Middle Low German, or Middle Flemish wigelen, frequentative of wiegen "to rock, wag, move back and forth," from wiege "cradle."

<<"The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Is the Hand That Rules the World" is a poem by William Ross Wallace that praises motherhood as the preeminent force for change in the world. The poem was first published in 1865 under the title "What Rules the World".>>

[neufer]

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There are quite a few stars that appear to be surrounded by something red. Is this an illusion created by the optics or something real?

<<The Spitzer mosaic image combines data from 4.5 microns (blue), 8.0 microns (green) and 24 microns (red). Spitzer uncovered 30 massive embryonic stars and 120 smaller newborn stars throughout the Trifid Nebula. These stars are visible in all the Spitzer images, mainly as yellow or red spots. Embryonic stars are developing stars about to burst into existence. >>

[alter-ego]

...
It's interesting to compare a visible-light image of the Trifid Nebula with Spitzer's infrared one. Note how one of the dark dust lanes of the Trifid appears in the infrared. There is what looks like a big yellow "egg", bisected by a wiggly dark line, in a position where a visible light image only shows us a dark dust lane.
...

That "infrared image" link has a very nice continuous display from visible to today's MIR image. Adjust the wavelength by dragging the bar with the mouse. I didn't see any mention of it today so I thought I would.
http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/infrared_gallery/4

Oh, you'll need to click to the 3rd image to the right in the gallery selection scroll window.

[Ann]

...
It's interesting to compare a visible-light image of the Trifid Nebula with Spitzer's infrared one. Note how one of the dark dust lanes of the Trifid appears in the infrared. There is what looks like a big yellow "egg", bisected by a wiggly dark line, in a position where a visible light image only shows us a dark dust lane.
...

That "infrared image" link has a very nice continuous display from visible to today's MIR image. Adjust the wavelength by dragging the bar with the mouse. I didn't see any mention of it today so I thought I would.
http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/infrared_gallery/4

Oh, you'll need to click to the 3rd image to the right in the gallery selection scroll window.

Thanks, that's a lot of fun!

Ann

[Ann]

There are quite a few stars that appear to be surrounded by something red. Is this an illusion created by the optics or something real?

Check out this suggestion from alter-ego:

alter-ego wrote:
That "infrared image" link has a very nice continuous display from visible to today's MIR image. Adjust the wavelength by dragging the bar with the mouse. I didn't see any mention of it today so I thought I would.
http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/infrared_gallery/4

Click to view full size image

Baby star surrounded by disk. The disk is seen as red.
Photo: Spitzer.

Check out the very first picture that turns up. At first, all you see is a dark cloud. But when you start dragging the bar with the mouse, a star with a huge red "halo" turns up.

This is what the Cool Cosmos page wrote about it:

Cool Cosmos wrote:
In the infrared view, the protostar glows red due to the warm glow of a surrounding disk that both feeds the growth of the star and provides material for building a surrounding planetary system.

So I thought that the red halos surrounding the three stars that you pointed out could be disks, too.

Ann

[Chris Peterson]

There are quite a few stars that appear to be surrounded by something red. Is this an illusion created by the optics or something real?

I'd say they're optical artifacts. If they were actual structures, they wouldn't be so uniform. Discs? Not a chance, or we'd see most of them at oblique angles. Spherical bubbles of some kind? What mechanism.

If fact, it's pretty common for images taken through different filters to have different resolutions and different optical issues. When you combine them, you end up with something that is particularly apparent because you only see it in one color.

I'd say these are simple star halos, some combination of diffraction and scatter in the optics.

[geckzilla]

What Chris said. It's just the point spread function for that filter with Spitzer. The PSF is pretty dramatically different between IRAC and MIPS. Every star gets a ring, but not every star is bright enough for it to be obvious.