Peering into clouds of dust to understand star formation

By Georgina Torbet January 7, 2023

A new image from the European Southern Observatory shows a stunning starscape around the nebula Sh2-54, located 6,000 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens. Located close in the sky to the famous Eagle Nebula, this is also a busy region of star formation where clouds of dust and gas are coalescing into knots and forming the hearts of new stars.

Nebulae like these are known as stellar nurseries because of all the new stars that form within them, and astronomers study them to learn more about stellar lifecycles and the conditions which are required for stars to form and grow.

This image of the spectacular Sh2-54 nebula was taken in infrared light using ESO’s VISTA telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile. The clouds of dust and gas that are normally obvious in visible light are less evident here, and in this light we can see the light of the stars behind the nebulae now piercing through. — This image of the spectacular Sh2-54 nebula was taken in infrared light using ESO’s VISTA telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile. The clouds of dust and gas that are normally obvious in visible light are less evident here, and in this light we can see the light of the stars behind the nebulae now piercing through. ESO/VVVX

The image was taken in the infrared range, which means less of the clouds of dust that form the nebula are visible. Instead, astronomers can look through the clouds of dust to see the stars forming within. It was taken using the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) telescope, a ground-based telescope located in the Atacama desert, a highly elevated and very dry location in Chile.

VISTA is part of the Paranal Observatory, which includes other telescopes like the Very Large Telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope. This location is one of the most popular places on the planet for building ground-based telescopes because it very rarely rains there, meaning there is also no cloud cover on most nights so telescopes can observe the night sky more often. It is also in a sparsely populated area, so there is very little interference from radio signals and little light pollution.

This particular image was taken using VISTA’s 67-million-pixel camera as part of a survey called VVV. This survey uses a wide range of telescopes including Hubble, Chandra, and VISTA to look at the bulge of the Milky Way which is also a busy area for star formation.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Tech News

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…

Space

Hubble spots a massive star forming amid clouds of dust and gas

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is a relatively close star-forming region known as IRAS 16562-3959.

A stunning new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the birth of a new, massive star at around 30 times the mass of our sun. Nestled with a nearby star-forming region called IRAS 16562-3959, the baby star is located within our galaxy and around 5,900 light-years from Earth.

You can see the sparkle of bright stars throughout the image, with the star-forming region visible as the orange-colored clouds of dust and gas stretching diagonally across the frame. These clouds are where dust and gas clump together to form knots, gradually attracting more dust and gas, growing over time to become protostars.

Space

Hubble spies baby stars being born amid chaos of interacting galaxies

Galaxy AM 1054-325 has been distorted into an S-shape from a normal pancake-like spiral shape by the gravitational pull of a neighboring galaxy, seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image. A consequence of this is that newborn clusters of stars form along a stretched-out tidal tail for thousands of light-years, resembling a string of pearls. They form when knots of gas gravitationally collapse to create about 1 million newborn stars per cluster.

When two galaxies collide, the results can be destructive, with one of the galaxies ending up ripped apart, but it can also be constructive too. In the swirling masses of gas and dust pulled around by the gravitational forces of interacting galaxies, there can be bursts of star formation, creating new generations of stars. The Hubble Space Telescope recently captured one such hotbed of star formation in galaxy AM 1054-325, which has been distorted into an unusual shape due to the gravitational tugging of a nearby galaxy.

Galaxy AM 1054-325 has been distorted into an S-shape from a normal pancake-like spiral shape by the gravitational pull of a neighboring galaxy, as seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image. A consequence of this is that newborn clusters of stars form along a stretched-out tidal tail for thousands of light-years, resembling a string of pearls. NASA, ESA, STScI, Jayanne English (University of Manitoba)

Space

Scientists investigate star formation in the famous Whirlpool Galaxy

This illustration depicts the distribution of diazenylium molecule radiation (false colours) in the Whirlpool Galaxy, compared with an optical image. The reddish areas in the photograph represent luminous gas nebulae containing hot, massive stars traversing dark zones of gas and dust in the spiral arms. The presence of diazenylium in these dark regions suggests particularly cold and dense gas clouds.

Scientists are turning to the beautiful and famous Whirlpool Galaxy to look for areas where stars could eventually be born. By mapping out the presence of particular chemicals, they hope to learn about the conditions that are required to give birth to new stars.

Researchers have mapped out regions of cold gas within the Whirlpool Galaxy, as it is these pockets of gas that gradually condense to form the knots that are the seeds of new stars. These knots attract more dust and gas due to gravity until they eventually become dense enough to collapse into a hot core called a protostar.