Don't be fooled by its pixelated look. A set of young stellar twins circle each other in this infrared image.

Weighing more than 10 times the mass of the Sun altogether, these two stars sit about 5,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cygnus. Researchers believe the stars are relatively young – only 100,000 years old – and make up the youngest massive binary system ever observed directly.

In this infrared view, the higher-mass primary star appears as the pink spot at the center, with its lower-mass companion showing as the green spot to the lower right.

The blue-white spots at the upper right and left in this image are holes cleared in the system’s surrounding circumstellar disk by outflow from the young star system. The presence of the disk, which itself contains about one-tenth the mass of the Sun or about 100 Jupiter masses, suggests that massive binary systems form by accreting material much like the Sun.

Astronomers with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used the UKIRT Telescope atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to observe the stellar pair in the infrared range of the light spectrum.

-- SPACE.com Staff

Credit: T.K. Sridharan (CfA), S.J. Williams & G.A Fuller (UMIST).