Daily Telescope: A monster protostar in a distant nebula

Zoom in / Great view of NGC 7538.

Paul Buckley

Welcome to Daily Telescope. There is too little darkness in this world and not enough light, too little pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let the other posts provide your daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we'll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe full of stars and wonders.

Good morning. It's January 11, and today's image shows a diffuse nebula known as NGC 7538, located in the constellation Valencia.

Located about 9,000 light-years from Earth, this nebula is an active star formation region and produces a large amount of hydrogen, which is shown in this image. The nebula contains a shockingly large protostar, Astronomers estimateIt is about 300 times larger than our solar system and has the mass of 2,000 suns. Even with the development of astronomical objects, this is huge.

Paul Buckley submitted today's photo, which he took from the backyard of his home in Elma, New York, which is located near Buffalo. The photo was taken during the first three days of last September. This image represents 100 six-minute narrow-band images and 50 two-minute RGB images using the 9.25-inch Celestron Edge HD telescope.

I think it's beautiful.

Source: Paul Buckley

Want to send a photo to the Daily Telescope? Contact us and say hello.