Located on the border between the constellations of Canis Major (The Great Dog) and Monoceros (The Unicorn) of the southern sky,the Seagull Nebula is a huge cloud composed mainly of hydrogen. It is an example of what astronomers callan HII region, and it is abouta complex, bird-shaped object made up of three large gas clouds: Sharpless 2-292 forms the “head”, Sharpless 2-296 comprises the huge “wings”, and Sharpless 2-297 is a small, tangled addition located on the tip of the seagull’s right “wing”. New hot stars form inside these clouds, and their intense ultraviolet radiation makes surrounding gas glow brightly. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has just obtained this spectacular new image of the “wings”, that is, the Sharpless cloud 2-296, where the reddish hue indicates the presence of ionized hydrogen.
All these objects are inscribed in theSharpless nebula catalog, a list of about 300 bright gas clouds compiled by the American astronomer Stewart Sharpless in the 1950s. Prior to publishing this catalog, Sharpless was a graduate student at the Yerkes Observatory near Chicago, USA, where he and his colleagues published observational work that helped show that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with huge arms. curved.
TheSpiral galaxies can contain thousands of HII regions, which are concentrated, for the most part, along his arms. The Seagull Nebula is located in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. The presence of HII regions indicates that star formation is still active in a galaxy.
This Sharpless 2-296 image wascaptured by the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument, a large camera installed on the MPG / ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. It only picks up a small section of the nebula, a huge cloud that is frantically forming hot stars within it, and is illuminated by several particularly bright young stars.
