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APOD
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Reflecting Merope
Explanation: In the well known Pleiades star cluster, starlight is slowly destroying this wandering cloud of gas and dust . The star Merope lies just off the upper left edge of this picture from the Hubble Space Telescope . In the past 100,000 years, part of the cloud has by chance moved so close to this star - only 3,500 times the Earth-Sun distance - that the starlight itself is having a very dramatic effect. Pressure of the star's light significantly repels the dust in the reflection nebula , and smaller dust particles are repelled more strongly. As a result, parts of the dust cloud have become stratified, pointing toward Merope . The closest particles are the most massive and the least affected by the radiation pressure . A longer-term result will be the general destruction of the dust by the energetic starlight .
| Date | July 15, 2006 |
|---|---|
| Credit | Credit: Hubble Heritage Team , George H. Herbig & Theodore Simon ( IfA, U. Hawaii ), NASA |
| Authors & editors: | Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP) |
| A service of: |
ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U. |