This image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, highlights several star-forming regions. There are five distinct centers of star birth in this one image alone. Star-forming nebulae (called HII regions by astronomers) are clouds of gas and dust that have been heated up by nearby stars recently formed from the same cloud, and have appeared in previously featured WISE images. The largest, brightest cloud, in the upper right is known as Gum 22. It's named after Colin Gum, an Australian astronomer who surveyed the southern hemisphere sky in the early 1950's looking for star-forming regions like these. He catalogued 85 new such regions, named Gum 1 to 85 (Gum Crater on the moon was also named in his honour). Going counter-clockwise from Gum 22, the other catalogued nebulae in the image are Gum 23 (part of same cloud as 22), IRAS 09002-4732 (orange cloud near centre), Bran 226 (upper cloud of the two at lower left), and finally Gum 25 at far lower left. There are also several smaller and/or more distant regions scattered throughout the image that have yet to be catalogued. Most of the regions are thought to be part of our local Orion spiral arm spur in the Milky Way Galaxy. Their distances range from about 4,000 to 10,000 light-years away.
