Never let anyone tell you that astronomy is not an art. It's knowing how to how to pick out the subtlest of signs, the tiny variations in interstellar temperatures, how to distinguish between atomic elements glowing millions of light years away...
And, of course, pick Santa Claus out of a cloud of hot space gas.
Myself, I'm not so sure about the interpretation of this latest find by researchers using the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope. They've discovered a hot cloud of gas in the Orion Nebula, which they say look just like Santa Claus. Myself, I'd say it's more of a giant, bipedal cat-creature with a jet pack, but I guess you see what you want to see.
The cloud itself is more interesting than its Rorschachian shape. It's in an area that had previously looked like a huge cavity in the nebula, when looking at it using infrared or visible light observatories. X-rays are able to penetrate the cold gas covering the front of the nebula, however.
The Orion nebula is a dense, star-forming region, with many young stars that are vastly larger than our Sun. One in particular, called Theta1
Orionis C, is about 40 times the Sun's mass, and is producing powerful solar winds heated to millions of degrees.
The collision between these winds and the surrounding dense gas is creating the Santa Claus-like (or giant jet-packed cat-like) cloud, researchers say.
Scientists had predicted the presence of such clouds, but had expected to find them where there were a large number of massive stars shedding winds, or in the presence of a supernova. This observation implies that the hot clouds can appear near smaller concentrations of high-mass stars as well.
A paper on the issue was published yesterday in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science.
An X-Ray Santa Claus in Orion [ESA press release]
(Image: An infrared view of the Orion Nebula, with the new X-ray data from XMM-Newton in blue. Credit: AAAS/Science (ESA XMM-Newton and NASA
Spitzer data))
