ESO APEX: ArTeMiS camera Captures Amazing Image of Cat's Paw Nebula

This image represents some of the first data collected by the ArTeMiS camera on the European Southern Observatory's APEX telescope. Image released Sept. 25, 2013.

Credit: ArTeMiS team/Ph. André, M. Hennemann, V. Revéret et al./ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit

A new camera on a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere has captured a stunning image of the Cat's Paw Nebula, offering a colorful and detailed view of a star-forming region of the Milky Way.

Released by the European Southern Observatory, the new photo of the Cat's Paw Nebula located about 5,500 light-years from Earth is one of the first shots taken by ArTeMiS — a submillimeter-wavelength camera added to APEX, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment in Chile. ESO officials also produced a video fly-through of the incredible Cat's Paw Nebula view using the new camera observations.

The new instrument is expected to help scientists create more detailed wide-field maps of the sky in a shorter amount of time, ESO officials said in an image description. But the installation of the new hardware was no cakewalk.



"The commissioning team that installed ArTeMiS had to battle against extreme weather conditions to complete the task," ESO officials wrote. "Very heavy snow on the Chajnantor Plateau had almost buried the APEX control building."

The staff had to use an improvised road in order to transport and install the instrument in its proper location.

The research team also battled the weather when it came time to observe using ArTeMiS. The light observed by the camera is absorbed by water vapor in Earth's atmosphere, according to ESO officials. Because of this, the scientists had to wait for dry weather before testing out the instrument.

Since its initial commissioning, researchers have used ArTeMiS for scientific projects including one that produced the new photo of the Cat's Paw Nebula.

"This new ArTeMiS image is significantly better than earlier APEX images of the same region," according to ESO officials.

The ArTeMiS cryostat installed in the APEX telescope on the Chajnantor Plateau in northern Chile. 

ArTeMiS is a new wide-field submillimetre-wavelength camera that will be a major addition to APEX’s suite of instruments and further increase the depth and detail that can be observed. 

Credit: ArTeMiS team/ESO

Since its initial commissioning, researchers have used ArTeMiS for scientific projects including one that produced the new photo of the Cat's Paw Nebula.

"This new ArTeMiS image is significantly better than earlier APEX images of the same region," according to ESO officials.

Herschel captures image of NGC 6334 the Cat's Paw Nebula

In this false-colour image of NGC 6334, red represents the Herschel 70 micron IR image, green represents the IRAC 8 micron image and blue represents the NEWFIRM 1 micron J band. 

The region is about 70 light years wide.

CREDIT: S. Willis (CfA+ISU); ESA/Herschel; NASA/JPL-Caltech/ Spitzer; CTIO/NOAO/AURA/NSF.

A nebula that shines about 5,500 light-years from Earth could be going through a "baby boom," according to a new study.

NGC 6334 (the Cat's Paw Nebula) might be one of the most productive star-forming regions in the Milky Way.

The nebula is home to tens of thousands of newly formed stars and plays host to about 200,000 suns' worth of star-creating material.

"NGC 6334 is forming stars at a more rapid pace than Orion — so rapidly that it appears to be undergoing what might be called a burst of star formation," the study's lead author Sarah Willis of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and Iowa State University said in a statement.

"It might resemble a 'mini-starburst,' similar to a scaled-down version of the spectacular bursts sometimes seen in other galaxies."

More than 2,000 of the stars in the nebula are very young and are still trapped inside the "dusty cocoons" that birthed them, scientists said.

Willis presented the new findings here today (June 5) at the 222nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Astronomers have observed distant, bright starbursting galaxies before, but because the Cat's Paw Nebula is a region within the Milky Way, scientists can get a better sense of why starburst regions might form and what they look like closer-up.

"Because NGC 6334 is nearby, astronomers can probe it in much greater detail, even down to counting the numbers of individual stars of various types and ages," CfA officials wrote.

Astronomers are still trying to investigate the origin of the starburst. Some researchers think that a blast from a supernova explosion or galactic collisions could create starbursts; however, neither of those explanations appear to explain the Cat's Paw Nebula's recent activity.

Scientists expect that the starburst will last for a relatively short amount of time in cosmic terms. In total, NGC 6334's burst will probably endure for only a few million years.

"We’re lucky, not only because it’s nearby but also because we’re catching it while the starburst is happening," Willis said.

Cat's Paw Nebula

The Cats Paw Nebula is revisited in a combination of exposures from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope and amateur astronomers Robert Gendler and Ryan M Hannahoe. 

The distinctive shape of the nebula is revealed in reddish puffy clouds of glowing gas against a dark sky dotted with stars.

Picture: ESO/AFP/GettyImages