The Elephant's Trunk (vdB 142) is a small puff of interstellar gas and dark dust that stands out because it is lucky enough to sit in front of a bright emission nebula, IC 1396, in the ionized hydrogen band — similar in shape and character to the more famous Rosette Nebula.
It is a column roughly twenty light years long, inside the vast IC 1396 region in the constellation of Cepheus, about 2,400 light years away. Its shape is no accident: the cloud is being blasted by the radiation of HD 206267, a very hot star at the centre of the cluster that lights the whole region. The most exposed gas is swept away, while the denser parts hold out and shield what lies behind them — so the cloud narrows into a trunk pointing at the star.
The bright rim outlining it is the ionization front, where radiation is literally eating into the cloud. But the same energy that ionized the surrounding nebula on one side has raised the pressure inside the trunk on the other, and it feeds the furnaces where several very young stars have already been born: less than a hundred thousand years old, which for a star is infancy.
The little hole visible in the trunk was carved by the winds of one of the very first stars born in there.
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