Gliese 710.

on
A view of a small part of the sky as if you were staring at a star (centre) approaching nearly head on, and then as it passes by and away again. The motion can be likened to what an observer standing beside a road would see looking at an approaching car, and then swinging around to continue to follow it as it moves away. As a result, the objects in the background – in this case distant stars – become blurred as you move quickly to maintain a visual on the passing object. The focus of this animation is the star known as Gliese 710. It will have a close encounter with our Sun in 1.3 million years, passing within the Oort Cloud reservoir of comets in the outskirts of our Solar System. The star is predicted to pass within about 2.3 trillion kilometres, the equivalent of about 16 000 Earth–Sun distances. The star’s motion is set against a background of other moving stars and the visualisation covers, very quickly, the timeframe from about 1.1–1.5 million years in the future. The size of

The Rosette Nebula in Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Sulfur

on
The Rosette Nebula is a large emission nebula located 3000 light-years away.

The great abundance of hydrogen gas gives NGC 2237 its red color in most photographs.
The wind from the open cluster of stars known as NGC 2244 has cleared a hole in the nebula's center.

The above photograph, however, was taken in the light emitted by three elements of the gas ionized by the energetic central stars. Here green light originating from oxygen and blue light originating from sulfur supplements the red from hydrogen.

Filaments of dark dust lace run through the nebula's gases. The origin of recently observed fast-moving molecular knots in the Rosette Nebula remains under investigation.



The Rosette Nebula in Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Sulfur
T. A. Rector, B. Wolpa, M. Hanna (AURA/NOAO/NSF)

Space