Bad Astronomy

A hot, young… cluster

OOooo, more pretty pictures!

This is the Coronet cluster:

The cluster is pretty close, about 400 light years away, and has many hot young stars in it (like the WB!). This image is a composite from Spitzer and Chandra: the red, green, and blue is infrared from Spitzer, and the purple is X-rays from Chandra. The hottest, youngest stars will be tinged purple; their youthful magnetic fields can heat up matter to millions of degrees, so they glow in X-rays. The diffuse purple stuff is dust scattering those X-rays.

I don’t have a lot of astronomical insight into this one, but sometimes pretty pictures are OK all by themselves.