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ESO 40/08 - Associated Image

11 November 2008
For Immediate Release

APEX reveals glowing stellar nurseries

Colour composite image of RCW120. It reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps where new stars are then formed. The 870-micron submillimetre-wavelength data were taken with the LABOCA camera on the 12-m Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope. Here, the submillimetre emission is shown as the blue clouds surrounding the reddish glow of the ionised gas (shown with data from the SuperCosmos H-alpha survey). The image also contains data from the Second Generation Digitized Sky Survey (I-band shown in blue, R-band shown in red).
Credit: ESO/APEX/DSS2/SuperCosmos/Deharveng(LAM)/Zavagno(LAM)

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