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A hot, young… cluster

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OOooo, more pretty pictures!

This is the Coronet cluster:

The cluster is pretty close, about 400 light years away, and has many hot young stars in it (like the WB!). This image is a composite from Spitzer and Chandra: the red, green, and blue is infrared from Spitzer, and the purple is X-rays from Chandra. The hottest, youngest stars will be tinged purple; their youthful magnetic fields can heat up matter to millions of degrees, so they glow in X-rays. The diffuse purple stuff is dust scattering those X-rays.

I don’t have a lot of astronomical insight into this one, but sometimes pretty pictures are OK all by themselves.

September 14th, 2007 9:00 AM by Phil Plait in Astronomy, Cool stuff, NASA, Pretty pictures | 9 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

9 Responses to “A hot, young… cluster”

  1. 1.   Dan Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 9:15 am

    Why does that picture remind me of the beginning of an old Battlestar Galactica episode?

  2. 2.   alfaniner Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 9:16 am

    It seems almost as if the Universe were “designed”…

    …solely to be used as a desktop wallpaper. :)

  3. 3.   KaiYeves Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 9:24 am

    Hmmmm… if “coronet” means crown, as I think it does, then this cluster is well named.

  4. 4.   Kevin Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 9:45 am

    The “WB?” Phil, you’re behind the TV times. The “WB” ceased to exist last year. It’s now “CW.” :)

    “There are some who believe that life here, began out there….”

  5. 5.   Dan Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 11:03 am

    Thanks Kevin. I couldn’t quite remember the words of Count Iblee’s monologue. That dude was totally the cylon leader, by the way.

    Damn… I really am a geek.

  6. 6.   Donnie B. Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 12:22 pm

    WB or CW… I just wish IT were 400 light-years away.

  7. 7.   alfaniner Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

    “Thanks Kevin. I couldn’t quite remember the words of Count Iblee’s monologue. That dude was totally the cylon leader, by the way.
    Damn… I really am a geek.”

    ???I always thought it was Wilfrid-Hyde White, one of the original council members on the pilot show??? (”Iblis”)

  8. 8.   Keith Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 6:12 pm

    Beauty!

    I’ll have to add this to my growing collection of desktop images.

    And yeah, I saw this too and thought, “Oh yeah, Battlestar Galactica…”

    Wonder if they’ll use any such images as backdrops as they near Earth in season 4?

  9. 9.   John Paradox Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 9:41 pm

    Count Iblee’s monologue. That dude was totally the cylon leader, by the way.
    ???I always thought it was Wilfrid-Hyde White, one of the original council members on the pilot show??? (”Iblis”)

    Iblis is correct, but it was Patrick McNee (TV’s Avengers) who did the opening voice-over.

    J/P=?

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