Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Something seems to be missing in a new image captured by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) this week – there’s a large patch of darkness where there should be stars.
Not to worry, though – the stars didn’t vanish, or burn out, or get sucked through a tear in the space-time continuum. Instead, the ESO said that the darkened area in the picture is actually a home to a cloud of gas and dust known as Lynds Dark Nebula 483 (LDN 483).
Clouds like LDN 483, they explain, are the birthplaces of future stars. This particular one, which was captured using the Wide Field Imager at the ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, is located approximately 700 light years away in the constellation of Serpens (The Serpent).
LDN 483 “contains enough dusty material to completely block the visible light from background stars,” the ESO explained. This ability to obscure light has led astronomers to classify especially dense molecular clouds such as this one as dark nebulae, and despite the absence of stars in these areas, they are actually extremely fertile environments for eventual star formation.
Studying star formation in LDN 483 has resulted in the discovery that it contained some of the youngest observable kinds of baby stars. These stars are still in the first stage of development, and are currently just a ball of gas and dust that is contracting under the force of gravity. It is still relatively cool (-250 degrees Celsius) and only shines in long-wavelength submillimeter light.
“Yet temperature and pressure are beginning to increase in the fledgling star’s core,” ESO officials explained. “This earliest period of star growth lasts a mere thousands of years, an astonishingly short amount of time in astronomical terms, given that stars typically live for millions or billions of years.”
“In the following stages, over the course of several million years, the protostar will grow warmer and denser,” they added. “Its emission will increase in energy along the way, graduating from mainly cold, far-infrared light to near-infrared and finally to visible light. The once-dim protostar will have then become a fully luminous star.”
As more stars begin to emerge from the dark depths of LDN 483, the nebula itself will further disperse and ultimately lose its opacity, the researchers said. The background stars that currently are hidden from view with then become visible. However, the process will take millions of years, and by that time, the old stars will be outshined by the newer, brighter stars that have been born.
Currently, the forming stars are between several hundred thousand to a few million years old, the ESO’s Fernando Comeron told BBC News. That is “basically nothing,” he said, considering that stars live for hundreds of millions (and in some cases, billions) of years. In fact, our own Sun is already more than 4.6 billion years old.
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