Reds vs Blues
7 সেপ্টেম্বর, 2011
This page isn't available in your language yet, if you'd like to provide a translation please contact us at info@unawe.org

Space is a colourful place! Take, for example, this beautiful new photo of a bright star cluster surrounded by blue and red clouds of gas (click on it to see it in full).

The way that the colours are neatly separated makes it look like a competition between the reds and the blues. In the red corner, there’s the gas that our Sun is mostly made of: hydrogen gas! And in the blue corner, we have the mighty Os that we need to breathe: oxygen gas!

Why are these gases separated into two teams? It all comes down to how much the gas is heated by stars – but not by those in the star cluster shown here. There’s another star cluster beyond the top-right corner of the picture, which contains hotter and younger stars.

The hot, young stars of this other star cluster are powerful enough to make the oxygen gas that is close to them (in the upper part of the picture) glow. But further away from this cluster, the stars can’t heat the oxygen gas enough to make it shine. Only hydrogen can glow at the bottom of the picture, as it takes less energy to make it shine than it does for oxygen.

So the gases aren’t really separated into two teams. The hydrogen and oxygen gases are actually mixed up, but which gas we see shining brightly depends on how close it is to the hottest star players.

কৌতূহলী তথ্য

About two thirds of the human body is made of oxygen!

This Space Scoop is based on a Press Release from ESO .
ESO
ছবি
বন্ধুত্বপূর্ণ সংস্করণ প্রিন্ট

এখনো কৌতুহলী? আরো পড়ো ..

স্পেস স্কুপ কি?

আরো জ্যোতির্বিদ্যা আবিষ্কার করো

নতুন প্রজন্মের মহাকাশ অনুসন্ধানকারীদের অনুপ্রাণিত করা

স্পেস স্কুপ বন্ধু

আমাদের সাথে যোগাযোগ করুন