NGC 3199

High-Res

Object: NGC 3199

NGC 3199, also known as RCW 48 and Gum 28, is a HII emission region lying about 12,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Carina. The bright western edge of this nebula is the most prominent portion of a complex shell morphology that extends southeastward to trace out an elliptical shape having an apparent dimension of about 25 arc-minutes along its major axis and 20 arc-minutes along the minor axis. The star exciting this nebula, asymmetrically placed within the ellipse, is Wolf-Rayet star HD 89358. It can be seen in the image as the most luminous star just right of the bright western arc of the nebula and lies at nearly the dead center of the frame.

Research on NGC 3199 by Whitehead, Meaburn and Goudis, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics (ref: 196, 262-265 (1988)) entitled ìThe Nature of the Wolf-Rayet Nebula NGC 3199î, concluded substantial stellar displacement of the Wolf-Rayet star has taken place during the time the nebular shell was forming and that radiative ionization and not the energetic stellar winds associated with the Wolf-Rayet is the dominant mechanism for the ionized gas in this nebula.

A bonus capture in the above image is the faint, slightly elliptical planetary nebula MeWe 1-2 (PN G283.4-01.3) in the upper left corner of the frame. This low surface brightness planetary is quite far along in its evolution and has been studied by Kerber, Furlan, Rauch and Roth to investigate the process by which processed nuclear material from the central star that created the nebula is returned to the interstellar medium (ISM), thus seeding the ISM for the chemical evolution of galaxies. This research was published in the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, ASP Conference Series Vol. 199, 2000 in an article entitled Planetary Nebula ISM Interaction: The Observational Evidence.