这个鲜为人知的星云IRAS 05437 + 2502在哈勃太空望远镜拍摄的这幅引人注目的图像中，在它周围的明亮恒星和黑暗尘埃云中汹涌而出。它位于金牛座（公牛）的星座，靠近银河系的中心平面。与许多哈勃望远镜的目标不同，这个目标尚未得到详细研究，其确切性质尚不清楚。乍一看它似乎是一个小的，相当孤立的恒星形成区域，人们可能会认为来自明亮的年轻恒星的强烈紫外线辐射的影响可能是引人注目的气体形状的原因。然而，明亮的飞旋镖形特征可能会带来更具戏剧性的故事。高速年轻恒星与气体和尘埃云的相互作用可能会产生这种异常锋利的明亮弧形。
这颗微弱的云最初是在1983年由红外天文卫星（IRAS）发现的，这是第一个用红外光测量整个天空的太空望远镜。IRAS由美国，荷兰和英国运营，发现了大量从地面看不见的新物体。
此图像是使用哈勃望远镜高级相机的宽视野通道拍摄的。这是“快照”调查的一部分。这些观察结果尽可能符合哈勃望远镜的繁忙时间表，而不保证观察将会发生 – 所以幸运的是观察完成了。此图片是通过黄色和近红外滤镜拍摄的图像创建的。
The little-known nebula IRAS 05437+2502 billows out among the bright stars and dark dust clouds that surround it in this striking image from the Hubble Space Telescope. It is located in the constellation of Taurus (the Bull), close to the central plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Unlike many of Hubble’s targets, this object has not been studied in detail and its exact nature is unclear. At first glance it appears to be a small, rather isolated, region of star formation and one might assume that the effects of fierce ultraviolet radiation from bright young stars probably were the cause of the eye-catching shapes of the gas. However, the bright boomerang-shaped feature may tell a more dramatic tale. The interaction of a high velocity young star and the cloud of gas and dust may have created this unusually sharp-edged bright arc. Such a reckless star would have been ejected from the distant young cluster where it was born and would travel at 200 000 km/hour or more through the nebula. This faint cloud was originally discovered in 1983 by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), the first space telescope to survey the whole sky in the infrared. IRAS was run by the United States, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom and found huge numbers of new objects that were invisible from the ground. This image was taken with the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys on Hubble. It was part of a “snapshot” survey. These are lists of observations that are fitted into Hubble’s busy schedule when possible, without any guarantee that the observation will take place — so it was fortunate that the observation was made at all! This picture was created from images taken through yellow (F606W) and near-infrared (F814W) filters. The exposure times were about eleven minutes per filter and the field of view is about 100 arcseconds across. Links Sahai, R., Claussen, M., Morris, M., & Ainsworth, R. 2009, Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 41, 456 Rosen,
图片来源：ESA / Hubble，R。Sahai和NASA
文字来源：欧洲航天局（ESA）