HOW鈥橲 this for horsepower? This beast is 10 million times as massive as the Earth, and it鈥檚 galloping away at 10 kilometres per second.
The Horsehead Nebula is a dusty cloud of gas near Orion鈥檚 belt, and deep within it new stars are forming. 鈥淓ven though it is so popular鈥ery little scientific work has been done on it,鈥� says Marc Pound of the University of Maryland, College Park.
To remedy that, he and his colleagues have mapped the cloud using the Berkeley Illinois Maryland Association array of radio telescopes in California. They say the equine shape, especially the nose and jaw, probably formed in the past few tens of thousands of years. Hot young stars are blasting it with radiation, so the cloud is doomed to disperse over the next 5 million years (The Astronomical Journal, vol 125, p 2108).
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