2026 March 09 - The Cranium Nebula from the Webb Telescope

0:00Greetings and welcome to the astronomy picture of the day podcast. Today's picture is titled The Cranium Nebula from the web telescope. So what do we see here? Well we see what is sometimes known as the cranium nebula for its resemblance to a human brain. Now what type of nebula is this? Well that's actually a very good question and it's one there's still actually some debate about and that is whether this is a planetary nebula the expelled remnant of a dying star like our Sun or if it is a very young hot massive star the type that would eventually becomes a supernova that is expelling its outer layers out into space. Now both of these do occur and they can look somewhat similar so it's not surprising that there can be some confusion on that and we see one image of it here taken by the mid infrared imager on the web space telescope but there's

1:04also a second image here and we can take a look at that taken with the near infrared. Now near infrared means it's closer to the visible portion of the spectrum. So just a little bit longer wavelengths off the edge there and then when we look at the mid infrared we're looking a little farther out into the infrared portion of the spectrum. So like visible light infrared is not just one wavelength of light but a whole band in the spectrum in fact a much larger band than visible light overall. So essentially the near infrared looks from the edge of the visible spectrum right where the red ends out to about five microns and the mid infrared takes place there picks up at five microns and goes out to about 27 microns. So those are two of the major imaging instruments that the web space telescope has and allows it to look at different wavelengths which give us different views and we can see that here as we go back and forth between

2:08these two images a little bit we can see that while the features are mostly the same something show up far more in the near infrared those would be slightly generally slightly hotter objects and some show up better in the mid infrared which would be somewhat cooler objects so we can see how the dust in the middle here becomes far more prominent in the mid infrared at those cooler temperatures than it is at the hotter temperatures that you would expect to see with the near infrared camera. So each is important because it gives us that different view of the universe and by looking at them together and studying them these and future images to be taken may help solve the mystery of what the cranium nebula actually is. Is it a dying star like our own son or is it a very young hot star that is just forming and expelling outer layers out into space in its very turbulent early stages and eventually one that would become a

3:12supernova and explode. So great questions and not something that's going to be answered today but hopefully in the future we will learn more about this in intriguing nebula. So that was our picture of the day titled the cranium nebula from the web telescope. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture preview to be telescope lasers. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow and until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.