21. January, 2024 - Reading time 5 min.

Hello out there!

How was your winter solstice season? For my part, the winter break has helped to get thru the dark days but it is time to brush off the snow and wake everything from the winter sleep.

I have lot of stuff going on and I am looking forward for some of it getting finished soon. The custom made packaging I designed for some of my Galactic Artifacts and Fossils is first thing that comes on my mind. There are 8 of them waiting on the table to be shown to the world. Laser cut EVA foam parts should arrive soon. I tried different materials as well, let´s see which one looks better. I´m looking forward to be able to photograph them and show it to all the fans of the Universe! But we´re here today to write about something completely else. Grab some pop-corn an buckle up. Journey to the Rosette Nebula starts now!

The nebula and the cluster it belongs to lie at a distance of 5,000 light-years from Earth and measure roughly 130 light years in diameter. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be around 10,000 solar masses. Let´s have a quick dive into some of the features of the Rosette to fully understand what has sparked my inspiration.

The Rosette Nebula is a star forming region. The surrounding gas that forms a fairly regular ring around the dark center is glowing because it is being blasted by radiation from nearby young stars formation, making the Rosette Nebula an emission nebula. Approximately 2500 young stars lie in this star-forming cradle, including the massive O-type stars which are primarily responsible for blowing the ionized bubble. Most of the ongoing star-formation activity is occurring in the dense molecular cloud to the south east of the bubble. A diffuse X-ray glow is also seen between the stars in the bubble. Ionized Hydrogen is responsible for red and ionized oxygen for blue hued regions.

The composition and the arrangement of the elements in the nebula are making it look very three dimensional. All those layers of gas, particles and stars look designed. If you consider the dimensions of the system, it looks to my like one of the biggest Universe artworks. In my interpretation of the Rosette Nebula I have turned it by roughly 90 degrees so the most pointy side shows downwards. When doing this you end up having this monolithic look that translated into my sculpture. The central bubble or hole of the Rosette is the substance of the artwork. It´ the darkest point under the lamp, it´s the silence in the middle of the noise – the emptiness is the essential building stone of this unimaginably mind bending Universe creation.

Now come the mysterious part about the Rosette Nebula. Though the stars influence the shape of the nebula, they don’t explain the hole. The size and age of which simply don’t correspond directly with the stars. If it was influenced by those stars, which are estimated to be 2 million years old, the hole would be larger. Given the length of time the stellar winds of the stars would have been flowing, researchers expected the hole to be up to 10 times bigger than it actually was.

James Webb Space Telescope made recently some observations about the earliest galaxies in the farthest parts of the universe. Their age and evolution stage do not add up to our generally accepted age and creation model of the universe. This makes you wonder about the unexplainable cavity in the middle of rosette Nebula even more!

Peter Von Hauerland

Backround image: Rosette Nebula. Author: Jaume Zapata, X Handle: @jaume_zapata

Aditional pictures:

James Clark, X Handle: @clarkjames70

Dr. Peter, X Handle: @Quant_Analyst

Jean M Dean, Guernsey

Jaume Zapata

Peter Von Hauerland: Rosette Nebula sculpture, Front

Peter Von Hauerland: Rosette Nebula sculpture, Rear