Baby Stars Born Anew
Newborn stars are peeking out from under a dust blanket within the Rho Ophiuchi dark cloud. Astronomers call the image, taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, the “Rho Oph”. One of the closest star -forming regions to our solar system, it is located close to the constellations Scorpius and Ophiuchus, with the nebula about 407 light years away from Earth. X - Ray and observation show more than 300 young stellar objects within the large central cloud.
With a median age of 300,000 years, these stars are considered extremely young when compared to the universe’s oldest stars, which are more than 12 billion years old.. The large main cloud, Rho Oph, is composed of molecular hydrogen, a key molecule allowing new stars to form from cold cosmic gas; with two long streamers training off in different directions. Created with data from Spitzer’s infrared array camera, the false - color image of Rho Oph’s main cloud, Lynds 1688 has the highest spatial resolution of Spitzer’s three imaging instruments. Blue represents 3.6 micron light, green is 4.5, orange is 5.8, and red is 8.0 micron light.
Multiple wavelengths reveal different aspects of the dust that surrounds and is between the embedded stars, yielding information about the stars and their origin. Relative temperatures and evolutionary states of various stars are reflected by colors in the images. The youngest stars are yellow-green, surrounding by dusty disks of gas from which they and their potential planetary systems are forming. More evolved stars who have shed their natal material are blue-white, while young stellar objects are surrounded by their own compact nebulae.
A region of the cloud, the white nebula which is extended in the center right of the image, is glowing in infrared light because of the illumination of dust by bright young stars near the right edge of the cloud. The image shows red and pink diffuse emission from carbon-rich dust molecules. Most stars forming now are found in a filament of cold dense gas that appears as a dark cloud in the lower center and left side of the image with a bright white background of warm dust. This dark filament is very opaque even though infrared radiation at 8 microns pierces through dust easily. It is dark even at the longest wavelength in the image. The Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate Washington is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt MD built by Spitzer’s infrared array camera.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
