NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope recently observed a colorful starry region and it looks like a giant “cosmic bubble bath” in the Milky Way.
Spitzer snapped the infrared image above, which shows a cloud of gas and dust filled with bubbles that are inflated by radiation and wind from young, enormous stars. Each of these bubbles contains hundreds to thousands of stars that develop from dense clouds of dust and gas.
Astronomers estimate that the bubbles are 10 to 30 light-years across, but determining the exact size of each bubble can be challenging, because it’s hard to measure their distance from our planet and objects look smaller the farther away they are from us.
According to NASA, this active starry region is located in the Milky Way galaxy in the constellation Aquila. Black veins that are present throughout the cloud are areas of very dense, cold dust and gas where more new stars are likely to develop.
Witness a cosmic bubble bath
This effervescent @NASASpitzer image is full of bubbles inflated by wind and radiation from young, massive stars: https://t.co/q2j6tzNuKR pic.twitter.com/uYrdg5JL3q
— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) September 30, 2019
Colors in the image above represent different wavelengths of infrared light: Blue depicts a wavelength of light that’s primarily emitted by stars, green shows the dust and organic molecules called hydrocarbons, and red indicates warm dust heated by stars.
Bow shocks, also known as arcs of warm dust, are shown in the four images here. (Photo Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech)
Four bow shocks, red arcs of warm dust created as winds from fast-moving stars push aside dust grains spread out through most of the nebula, are also visible in the image. Squares (see above) disclose the location of these bow shocks, which look like specs of red in front of a vibrant background.
The bubbles and bow shocks above were identified as part of The Milky Way Project, a citizen science initiative that aims to map out star formation throughout the galaxy. Citizen scientists who participated in the project combed through images from Spitzer’s public data archive and pointed out as many bubbles as possible. The full Milky Way Project catalogues, which disclose a total of 2,600 bubbles and 599 bow shocks, are detailed in a paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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