This image of the Horsehead Nebula from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope focuses on a portion of the horse’s “mane” that is about 0.8 light-years in width. It was taken with Webb’s NIRCam . The ethereal clouds that appear blue at the bottom of the image are filled with a variety of materials including hydrogen, methane, and water ice. Red-colored wisps extending above the main nebula represent both atomic and molecular hydrogen.
This image showcases three views of one of the most distinctive objects in our skies, the Horsehead Nebula. The first image , released in November 2023, features the Horsehead Nebula as seen in visible light by ESA’s Euclid telescope. The second image shows a view of the Horsehead Nebula in near-infrared light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which was featured as the telescope’s 23rd anniversary image in 2013.
The Horsehead Nebula is a well-known photodissociation region, or PDR. In such a region, ultraviolet light from young, massive stars creates a mostly neutral, warm area of gas and dust between the fully ionized gas surrounding the massive stars and the clouds in which they are born. This UV radiation strongly influences the chemistry of these regions and acts as a significant source of heat.
Due to its proximity and its nearly edge-on geometry, the Horsehead Nebula is an ideal target for astronomers to study the physical structures of PDRs and the molecular evolution of the gas and dust within their respective environments, and the transition regions between them. It is considered one of the best regions in the sky to study how radiation interacts with interstellar matter.
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