The Lynx Arc was discovered in 2003 and is considered to be the hottest known star-birthing region in the
Universe as of October 2003. It is located at .
It is located in the constellation
Lynx
A lynx is a type of wild cat.
Lynx may also refer to:
Astronomy
* Lynx (constellation)
* Lynx (Chinese astronomy)
* Lynx X-ray Observatory, a NASA-funded mission concept for a next-generation X-ray space observatory
Places Canada
* Lynx, Ontar ...
, 12 billion light years away (z=3.357
[R. A. E. Fosbury et al. (2003 October 20]
"Massive Star Formation in a Gravitationally Lensed H II Galaxy at z = 3.357"
''The Astrophysical Journal'', 596:797-809) from
Earth, 8 million times farther away and one million times brighter than the
Orion Nebula
The Orion Nebula (also known as Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) is a diffuse nebula situated in the Milky Way, being south of Orion's Belt in the constellation of Orion. It is one of the brightest nebulae and is visible to the naked eye in the nig ...
. It is estimated to contain around one million
O-type stars
An O-type star is a hot, blue-white star of spectral type O in the Yerkes classification system employed by astronomers. They have temperatures in excess of 30,000 kelvin (K). Stars of this type have strong absorption lines of ionised helium, s ...
.
[Sol Station]
Lynx Arc
(accessed 2009 September 15)
The Lynx Arc was found in a systematic search around
galaxy cluster RX J0848+4456 (z=0.570),
with the help of a
gravitational lens, a 4.5 billion light years distant galaxy cluster (
CL J0848.8+4455 lying at z=0.543
[). Amongst others the ]Keck Observatory
The W. M. Keck Observatory is an astronomical observatory with two telescopes at an elevation of 4,145 meters (13,600 ft) near the summit of Mauna Kea in the U.S. state of Hawaii. Both telescopes have aperture primary mirrors, and when comp ...
, the Hubble Space Telescope and ROSAT participated in the search.
Located behind a cluster of galaxies in northern Constellation Lynx around 12 billion light-years (ly) away, the Lynx Arc is a distant supercluster of extremely hot, young stars. Roughly one million times brighter than the well-known Orion Nebula, the Lynx Arc contains a million blue stars that are twice as hot as similar stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Only visible through gravitational lensing by a closer cluster of galaxies, the Arc is a feature of the early days of the universe, when "furious firestorms of star birth" were more common. It may be going through a short-lived luminous phase that may have lasted for as little as a few million years (Fosbury et al., 2003, in pdf).
The surface temperature of the stars in the Lynx Arc is estimated to be around 80000 K, about twenty times as hot as stars in our neighborhood. Only the stars formed directly after the Big Bang
The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from the ...
( Population III stars) are considered to be hotter (around 120000 K). The universe was only 2 billion years old at the time at which we are observing the Lynx Arc. The first stars were born 1.8 billion years before the Lynx Arc.
References
External links
M.W. Keck Observatory
{{Stars of Lynx
Lynx (constellation)
H II regions