The 'Flame' Burns Bright in New WISE Image

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Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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News feature: 2012-193 July 2, 2012

The 'Flame' Burns Bright in New WISE Image

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-193&cid=release_2012-193

A new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows the
candle-like Flame nebula lighting up a cavern of dust. The Flame nebula is part of the
Orion complex, a turbulent star-forming area located near the constellation's star-studded
belt.

The image is being released today along with a new batch of data from the mission. Last
March, WISE released its all-sky catalog and atlas containing infrared images and data on
more than a half billion objects, including everything from asteroids to stars and galaxies.
Now, the mission is offering up additional data from its second scan of the sky.

"If you're an astronomer, then you'll probably be in hog heaven when it comes to infrared
data," said Edward (Ned) Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator of the WISE
mission. "Data from the second sky scan are useful for studying stars that vary or move
over time, and for improving and checking data from the first scan."

The new WISE view of the Flame nebula, in which colors are assigned to different
channels of infrared light, looks like what appears to be a flaming candle sending off
billows of smoke. In fact, the wispy tendrils in the image are part of the larger Orion star-
forming complex, a huge dust cloud churning out new stars. In the Flame nebula, massive
stars are carving a cavity in this dust. Intense ultraviolet light from a central massive star
20 times heavier than our sun, and buried in the blanketing dust, is causing the cloud to
glow in infrared light. This star would be almost as bright to our eyes as the three stars in
Orion's belt, but the dust makes the star appear 4 billion times fainter than it really is.

Other features in this view include the nebula NGC 2023, seen as a bright circle in the
lower half of the image, and the famous Horsehead nebula, which is hard to see but
located to the right of one of the lower, vertical ridges. The bright red arc at lower right is
a bow shock, where material in front of the speeding multiple-star system Sigma Orionis
is piling up.

The data released today cover about one-third of the mission's second full scan of the sky.
They were taken from August to September 2010 as the telescope began to deplete its
coolant, operating with three of its four infrared detectors. The coolant kept the telescope
chilled to prevent its heat, or infrared radiation, from interfering with the observations. As
the telescope warmed during this period, one of the four channels on WISE was
overwhelmed by the infrared radiation.

An introduction and quick guide to accessing the WISE all-sky archive for astronomers is
online at: http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/ .

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages, and operated, WISE for
NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode in
2011 after it scanned the entire sky twice, completing its main objectives. Edward Wright
is the principal investigator and is at UCLA. The mission was selected competitively
under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center
in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in
Logan, Utah. The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in
Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared
Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and
http://jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

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