Hot young stars sparkle in the center of a huge cloud of interstellar gas hydrogen. This photograph was taken by the MPG / ESO 2, 2 meter telescope by the European Southern Observatory at La Silla in the Atacama Desert (Chile).
The intense radiation emitted by the stars ionizes the hydrogen in the clouds. This causes it to glow with the red long waves of visible light. The nebula named Gum 41 is located at a distance of 7300 light years from the planet Earth. She is in the constellation Centaurus. The picture at the beginning of the article was made using a special filter designed to enhance the red glow of hydrogen. In fact, if you flew past Gum 41, you would not be able to see this glow. Gas and light are scattered there. Gum 41 did not deserve his name, because he looks like a lump of chewing gum. This nebula, like many others, was discovered by the Australian astronomer Colin Gum in 1951. The nebula was introduced into the well-known HII emission nebula catalog, which was published four years later.
Unfortunately, the talented Gum died through an accident that happened when he was skiing in the mountains of Switzerland in 1960. Then he was only 36 years old. 85 nebulae and 1 crater on the moon are named after him.
