It's Halloween! NASA finds a 'cosmic pumpkin', a star about 15 to 20 times heavier than our sun and it's freaky!
NASA has a Halloween treat for us. Their Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted something that looks like a pumpkin that has been carved out of a giant cloud of gas and dust.
The star behind the spectacle, according to NASA scientists, is the O-type star -- which is about 15 to 20 times heavier than the Sun. The study's authors have nicknamed the structure the "Jack-o'-lantern Nebula (pictured above is an artist's drawing that reveals why researchers nicknamed this region the Jack-o'-lantern Nebula by NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Splitze, managed and operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, sees objects and captures images of objects in space using infrared light: a plethora of objects in the universe emit infrared light, often as heat. The more "warm" the object is, the more heat it tends to radiate, according to NASA.
The telescope has captured images that have largely been hidden in the universe: from documenting stars in every stage of life and mapping our home galaxy to looking for newly discovered planets orbiting distant stars and clicking gorgeous images of nebula.
And now the telescope adds another feather to its cap by capturing the cosmic pumpkin or the Jack-o'-lantern Nebula, thanks to the NASA scientists, who were probing the outer region of the Milky Way galaxy.
The colours in the image, explain scientists, are due to different wavelengths of light that are emitted from the structure. Of the colours, green and red lights are coming out of dust radiating at different temperatures. They combine to create yellow hues in the image. While blue represents a wavelength mostly emitted by stars and some very hot regions of the nebula, white indicates where the objects are bright in all three colors, as per NASA. And in the center of a red dust shell, near the center of the scooped-out region is the O-type star appearing as a white spot.
Splitze's space odyssey will come to a close on 30 January 2020, after operating for more than 11 years beyond its prime mission. The observations have produced in the Astrophysical Journal.