The Tadpoles Nebula
‘Stars so young... they’re still wrapped in their dusty baby blankets.’
Billions of years ago the Milky Way galaxy began to form out of the primordial soup of the Big Bang and leftovers from the early universe’s long-dead first stars. All this stuff coalesced into a graceful flattened spiral disc spawning several generations of stars, our sun being one of hundreds of billions. The ever repeating stellar lifecycle led to the sun becoming a middle aged 4.6-billion-year-old yellow dwarf to the more recent infant star cluster (NGC 1893) that you see in the image on this page.
Most of the 4,600 newborn stars are so young (between one to four million years old) they’re still wrapped in their dusty “baby blankets.” The brightest and largest youngsters appear to have a reddish halo around them, an artifact from my telescope’s sulfur filter. The birthplace of NGC 1893 is in the nebula called IC 410. I processed this image in false color to emphasize the gases ionized by intense stellar radiation generated by these birthing stars. The reddish orange brown clouds are a combination of hydrogen and sulfur while the blue portions are primarily oxygen. The dark regions inside the nebula are dust clouds dense enough to hide background stars.
The main feature of the nebula
is what appears to be two cosmic tadpoles. These resemble the famous “Pillars of Creation” imaged in a different nebula by the Hubble Space Telescope. However, the pillars in IC 410 are reduced to squiggly tails due to constant bombardment from fierce stellar winds emanating from the stars at the center of the cluster. The heads of both tadpoles are sculpted by bow shockwaves against denser molecular clouds, which are similar to those made by a boat or
supersonic jet.
So, even though this deep space object appears to be unchanged over hundreds of years, what’s going on there is indeed very dynamic. We don’t see immediate change because the nebula is so huge. The momentum is there. It just takes many human lifetimes to see the changes. IC 410 and NGC 1893 are 12,000 light years away, near the peak of the “roof” covering the “doghouse” shaped constellation Auriga The Charioteer. At
that distance, this image is about 100 light years wide.
The nebula is so dim that it took three nights in early December and over 11 hours of exposure time at Mount Sangre Observatory Angel Fire to get the detail you see here. With that in mind, 10x50 binoculars or a small telescope will reveal the star cluster but not the nebula high above the northeast horizon during prime viewing time (7-10 p.m.) throughout the month of February.