Friday, April 22, 2005
Burning Blob
Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have snapped new images of the Blob, a sinister-looking reddish cloud of ionized gas in the Milky Way's cosmic sidekick, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Blob looks like a cracked reptilian egg stretching some four light-years across. It's lit from withing by a powerfull object 200,000 times more luminous that the Sun. The astronomers speculate that the light source might be a very massive star of some 100 stellar masses in the process of being born.
"It is possible that the blob resulted from massive star formation following the collapse of a thin shell of neutral matter," said ESO astronomer Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri. Added his colleague Frederic Meynadier: "The formation mechanisms of these objects are not yet fully understood." Meynadier said that so far only a dozen of such "blobs" have been discovered.
"It is possible that the blob resulted from massive star formation following the collapse of a thin shell of neutral matter," said ESO astronomer Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri. Added his colleague Frederic Meynadier: "The formation mechanisms of these objects are not yet fully understood." Meynadier said that so far only a dozen of such "blobs" have been discovered.
