Gomez's Hamburger (2013)

Gomez’s Hamburger is actually a protoplanetary disk. The buns are where light is illuminating dust and the patty is a torus of dust so thick that the star in the center is rendered invisible. Pretty cool!

For this one I used the set of optical data and then added some NICMOS infrared data to reveal the shape of the dust torus. Infrared data from NICMOS is really neat, but it also tends to be rather messy as far as aesthetics go so I limited it to just the torus. That, and it only extends a little way out from the nebula, otherwise I’d love to include infrared for the entire picture.

Red: hst_09315_01_wfpc2_f675w_pc_sci
Green: hst_09315_01_wfpc2_f555w_pc_sci
Blue: hst_09315_01_wfpc2_f450w_pc_sci

Infrared “patty”: HST_10603_17_NIC_NIC2_F110W_sci + HST_10603_17_NIC_NIC2_F160W_sci + HST_10603_17_NIC_NIC2_F205W_sci

North is NOT up. It’s 40° clockwise from up.

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.