I have a fondness for bipolar nebulae: double-barreled gaseous clouds formed when stars are born, and sometimes as they age and die. I've seen a lot of them, and studied a lot of them, so I was surprised to see this image from the Gemini North telescope of a BPN I'm not that familiar with, called Sharpless 2-106:
Oooo, pretty! Sharpless 2-106 is about 2000 light years away, located in a region of the galaxy known for birthing stars. The nebula is only about two light years across -- small for a star-forming region, but still over 2,000 times bigger than our entire solar system! Deep in the middle of the cloud is a star struggling to be born. It may have about 15 times the mass of the Sun, big enough to put it squarely into the "massive star" category. It's flooding the nebula with ultraviolet radiation, causing the ...
