Publication Date:
2011-08-17
Description:
New ultraviolet imagery of NGC 7000 has been obtained in a sounding-rocket flight with an electrographic Schmidt camera which covers the 1230-2000 A wavelength range and has a higher angular resolution than the Apollo 16 imagery. The integrated brightness of NGC 7000 near 1450 A is unexpectedly high (three times the brightness of HD 199579 as measured by CHB), but as no emission lines were observed with a nebular spectrograph, it is concluded that the radiation observed in the UV image is nearly pure continuum. Comparison with the blue continuum image is not possible, as the latter image has dominant contributions due to night sky background, hydrogen recombination continuum, and possibly unresolved faint stars. It is suggested that the high UV brightness of NGC 7000 is due to the highly efficient dust scattering of stellar radiation.
Keywords:
ASTRONOMY
Type:
Astrophysical Journal; vol. 237
Format:
text