Massimo's photoblog

Spitzer Space Telescope (2007)

The constallation Vela takes its name from the “sail” of Argo, the mythical ship on which Jason and the Argonauts sailed to retrieve the Golden fleece. The constellation hosts a vast complex of clouds where new stars are being born. This is not the only place in our Galaxy where stars are currently formed (the Orion nebula being perhaps the most famous one), but it is special to us because it is at a larger distance from the center of the Galaxy, than the Sun is. As such, it allows us to study the processes of star formation in the periphery of our “island universe”.

The image shows some of the star forming clouds in Vela. This is just a detail of a much larger map I made using data I took this year with the Spitzer Space Telescope. The color in the image are not the same a human eye would see. Spitzer is an infrared telescope, and as such it records light which our eyes are not sensitive to. It is a bit like a digital infrared film, except that the radiation that Spitzer records is more extreme than the one of a regular infrared film. If I had to be faithful to the color scheme of the human vision, the picure would have appeared completely black. I chose instead to associate the red, green and blue components of the image to three different infrared colors: blue to the colors typical of the stars and shocked gas, green to the color of small dust grains, and red to the color of cold dust. In this way, the image helps to understand the different components of this cosmic vista. For example, the red dots in the image indicate the presence of very young stars still embedded in their dusty cocoon. The gree arabesques trace the distribution of hot dust where star formation is enhanced. The blue dots shows the distribution of older stars.

If you are so inclined you can read the paper I wrote with my italian collaborators, based on the analysis of just the “red” component of this image: astro-ph/07909.1060. We are now working in trying to understand the whole picture using all the components of these image.