A nurturing cloud of cosmic material has been ripped apart by hot winds from giant stars, leaving other newborn stars exposed for astronomers to photograph.
Researchers took advantage of the veritable hole in the sky and photographed several stars in wavelengths of radiation just outside the visible range of light. The result is what astronomers say are among the earliest snapshots ever taken of massive stars being born.
Massive stars, weighing at least eight times as much as the Sun, are typically incubated far from our local stellar neighborhood and their birth and development is rapid, making it hard to spot the process in action.
Further, massive stars tend to form in chaotic clusters and are typically shrouded in one or more clouds of gas and dust that serve as the raw materials of star birth. But there is sometimes a window: These action of newborn stars -- intense ultraviolet radiation and sharp stellar winds of charged particles -- can rip holes in the clouds.
The new observations peer through these holes.
They were made with several instruments and the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
"I know of no other high-mass protostellar candidates which have been revealed at such an early evolutionary stage," said ESO astronomer Dieter Nürnberger, who led the work. "The new near- and mid-infrared observations are giving us a first look into this extremely interesting phase of stellar evolution."
The pictures show the sky around a cluster of hot, young stars called NGC 3603. The region is about 22,000 light-years away in a spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. It was first photographed from the ESO in 1999.
The new observations uncovered a small group of nascent, very massive stars south of the cluster center. A handful of newborn stars in the group, called IRS9, are visible in one new picture.
Astronomers hope the observations will help solve a puzzle regarding the formation of massive stars. Theorists are not certain if they develop by capturing large amounts material falling inward over time, or if perhaps two developing stars collide to make one more massive object.
A study of the observations, announced Monday, was recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
advertisement
