Living on earth entails a never-ending cycle of life, death and rebirth. In space, the same is true, as spotted by astronomers in IC 4628, or the Prawn Nebula.
Just a few million years old, three clusters of hot young stars reside in the massive stellar nursery that is the Prawn Nebula. With the stars glowing brightly as observed in ultraviolet light, they cause the gas clouds in the nebula to glow as well, each chemical element emitting a characteristic color as hydrogen clouds glow red.
Prawn Nebula, also called Gum 56, as named after Colin Stanley Gum, the Australian astronomer that cataloged the H II regions like the nebula in 1955, features low-density but massive clouds of ionized hydrogen. A significant portion of the ionization that occurs in the nebula is caused by two O-type stars, which are blue giants. Blue giants are in the universe because they have very large masses that meant they don't live long, no thanks to their propensity to collapse in on themselves after just about a million years and turn into supernovae.
Aside from the newborn stars in the Prawn Nebula, the region is also still filled with more than enough gas and dust to produce even newer stars. The parts of the nebula where new stars form is visible as dense clouds, full of remains from previous massive stars that have already exploded. With material from an older generation of stars fueling the growth of new ones, cosmic recycling is observed and stellar life continues.
Given the blue giants in the Prawn Nebula and how prominent the nebula is when viewed under radio and infrared wavelengths, it's surprising that the region has been studied little by astronomers. The nebula is about 250 light years in diameter but is often overlooked despite its size because it is faint, with a lot of the light it emits not visible to the naked eye.
The nebula is located around 6,000 light-years away from earth. It is found within the Scorpius constellation, where its projected size is four times as that of a full moon. Images of the Prawn nebula were captured using the 2.2-meter MPG-ESO telescope with a Wide Field Imager through the ESO Cosmic Gems program.
