Front-row seat to see how stars are born
Print Edition
THE European Space Agency yesterday released stunning images of baby stars taking shape inside the Milky Way’s Orion nebula.
The massive Orion A molecular cloud is the “star factory” closest to Earth, and gives astronomers a front-row seat to observe how stellar objects come into being.
The Orion nebula is some 1,350 light years from Earth and has a mass 2,000 times greater than our sun.
Very young stars cannot be seen in the visible light spectrum. But the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope in Chile — the largest in the world dedicated to surveying the heavens — pierces the dust that shrouds them by zeroing in on infrared wavelengths.
The new image survey “allows the earliest evolutionary phases of young stars within nearby molecular clouds to be systematically studied,” the observatory said.
The project has so far identified nearly 800,000 new stars, young “stellar objects” and distant galaxies.
The Orion nebula, visible with the naked eye in the night sky, was first scientifically described in the early 17th century.
In 1789, British astronomer William Herschel prophetically described nebula such as Orion as “the chaotic material of future suns.”
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