NEW INTERSTELLAR DISCOVERY
When our team of photographers realized what we had found, we could hardly believe it was real. A gargantuan nebula equal in size to four full Moons in the sky, hidden in plain sight in the most famous constellation in the world, nearby the most photographed nebulae that exist.
We collectively decided to name this beast the ‘Atlas Nebula’, after the Greek Titan who held the celestial vault on his back, depicted as a blue globe. This nebula is blue, circular, and gigantic, so we thought it was the perfect name.
We believe this nebula is the result of a supernova. This happens when a massive star exhausts its fuel, triggering a collapse of the star, and then an outwards explosion. What remains of this explosion is a beautiful shell of superheated oxygen gas called O-iii.
We aren’t sure when this explosion happened, but it is certainly ancient. Given its location in Orion, it would’ve been visible to any human on Earth. So it must’ve occurred before written history.
How does a gigantic nebula go undetected for so long in one of the most viewed part of the sky? The answer is that this nebula is faint. Tens of thousands of times fainter than the nearby Orion Nebula.
Our team came to discover this faint nebula through an exhaustive search of the night sky in both radio wavelengths, and in Oxygen-iii emission. The first hint of the object was so faint, that it was hard to say there was anything there at all.
But, after 327 hours of exposure time from our team in both Morocco and California, the full structure of the Atlas Nebula became visible. What we see is a beautiful Oiii dominated shell, with wisps of red hydrogen emission.
This nebula symbolizes a revolutionary shift in astronomy. Never before since the invention of the telescope, has it been so accessible for an average person to gaze out into space, and discover something new. Even in Orion, a place in the sky which has been considered ‘totally mapped out’, there are things waiting to be known.
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All it takes is a couple telescopes, and a dream!
Our team: Bray Falls, Curtis Morgan, Marcel Drechsler, Yann Sainty, Dr. Robert Fesen, Aziz Kaeouach, Richard Galli