File:Infant Stars in Orion - chaotic birth of stars.jpg
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Summary
DescriptionInfant Stars in Orion - chaotic birth of stars.jpg |
English: These four images taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveal the chaotic birth of stars in the Orion complex, the nearest major star-forming region to Earth. The snapshots show fledgling stars buried in dusty gaseous cocoons announcing their births by unleashing powerful winds, as well as pairs of spinning, lawn-sprinkler-style jets shooting off in opposite directions. Near-infrared light pierces the dusty region to unveil details of the birthing process. The stellar outflows are carving out cavities within the gas cloud, composed of hydrogen gas. This relatively brief birthing stage lasts about 500,000 years. Although the stars themselves are shrouded in dust, they emit powerful radiation, which strikes the cavity walls and scatters off dust grains, illuminating in infrared light the gaps in the gaseous envelopes. Astronomers found that the cavities in the surrounding gas cloud sculpted by a forming star’s outflow did not grow regularly as they matured, as theories propose. The young stars in these images are just a subset of an ambitious study of 304 developing stars, the largest-ever to date. Researchers used data previously collected from Hubble as well as the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope andthe European Space Agency's Herschel Space Telescope. The protostars were photographed in near-infrared light by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. The images were taken Nov. 14, 2009, and Jan. 25, Feb. 11, and Aug. 11, 2010. |
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Source | https://esahubble.org/images/opo2106a/ |
Author | NASA, ESA, STScI, N. Habel and S. T. Megeath (University of Toledo) |
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ESA/Hubble images, videos and web texts are released by the ESA under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license and may on a non-exclusive basis be reproduced without fee provided they are clearly and visibly credited. Detailed conditions are below; see the ESA copyright statement for full information. For images created by NASA or on the hubblesite.org website, or for ESA/Hubble images on the esahubble.org site before 2009, use the {{PD-Hubble}} tag.
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This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Attribution: ESA/Hubble
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Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
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current | 14:45, 24 March 2021 | 4,000 × 3,473 (4.31 MB) | Pandreve | Uploaded a work by NASA, ESA, STScI, N. Habel and S. T. Megeath (University of Toledo) from https://esahubble.org/images/opo2106a/ with UploadWizard |
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Author | Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach |
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Source | ESA/Hubble |
Credit/Provider | NASA, ESA, STScI, N. Habel and S. T. Megeath (University of Toledo) |
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Date and time of data generation | 14:00, 18 March 2021 |
JPEG file comment | Though our galaxy is an immense city of at least 200 billion stars, the details of how they formed remain largely cloaked in mystery. Scientists know that stars form from the collapse of huge hydrogen clouds that are squeezed under gravity to the point where nuclear fusion ignites. But only about 30 percent of the cloud’s initial mass winds up as a newborn star. Where does the rest of the hydrogen go during such a terribly inefficient process? It has been assumed that a newly forming star blows off a lot of hot gas through light-saber-shaped outflowing jets and hurricane-like winds launched from the encircling disk by powerful magnetic fields. These fireworks should squelch further growth of the central star. But a new, comprehensive Hubble survey shows that this most common explanation doesn’t seem to work, leaving astronomers puzzled. Researchers used data previously collected from NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Telescope to analyze 304 developing stars, called protostars, in the Orion Complex, the nearest major star-forming region to Earth. (Spitzer and Herschel are no longer operational.) In this largest-ever survey of nascent stars to date, researchers are finding that gas clearing by a star’s outflow may not be as important in determining its final mass, as conventional theories suggest. The researchers’ goal was to determine whether stellar outflows halt the infall of gas onto a star and stop it from growing. Instead, they found that the cavities in the surrounding gas cloud sculpted by a forming star’s outflow did not grow over time, as theories propose. “In one stellar formation model, if you start out with a small cavity, as the protostar rapidly becomes more evolved, its outflow creates an ever-larger cavity until the surrounding gas is eventually blown away, leaving an isolated star,” explained lead researcher Nolan Habel of the University of Toledo in Ohio. “Our observations indicate there is no progressive growth that we can find, so the cavities are not growing until they push out all of the mass in the cloud. So, there must be some other reason why the gas doesn’t all end up in a star.” |
Software used | Adobe Photoshop 22.1 (Macintosh) |
File change date and time | 11:14, 1 February 2021 |
Date and time of digitizing | 07:42, 24 June 2020 |
Date metadata was last modified | 10:50, 2 February 2021 |
Unique ID of original document | xmp.did:cab25a45-1f6a-4dfd-8397-82edd4757edf |
Keywords | Orion Nebula |
Contact information | outreach@stsci.edu
ESA Office, Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Dr Baltimore, MD, 21218 United States |
IIM version | 4 |