RCW120 | Milky Way Wall Art including Frame Frame Colors:Walnut The nebula contains stars equivalent

The nebula contains stars equivalent to over 25 000 Suns

R Aquarii is a so-called “symbiotic binary”

Image Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

tuned to detect carbon monoxide molecules in the otherwise invisible hydrogen clouds

implying that the planetary nebula’s structure is aligned in the same way

RCW120 | Milky Way Wall Art including Frame Frame Colors:Walnut The nebula contains stars equivalentColour 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