Latest Star formation Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The European Space Agency (ESA) said its Herschel space observatory found a gas and dust cloud that contains enough water vapor to fill Earth's oceans more than 2,000 times over. The new observations of a pre-stellar core--or cold, dark clouds of gas and dust--in the constellation of Taurus are the first detection of water vapor in a molecular cloud on the verge of star formation. “To produce that amount of vapor, there must be...
Lee Rannals (http://blogs.redorbit.com/author/rannals/) for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new image taken by the European Space Agency’s Herschel space observatory, shows off two nebulous blue orbs in the Vela C region. Vela C is one of four regions known as the Vela Molecular Ridge, which is a complex of gas and dust located 2,300 light-years from Earth and weighing about 500,000 times the mass of the sun. The image shows the interplay between gravity and turbulence in the...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Hubble Space Telescope has unleashed a new image of a geyser of hot gas flowing from a newborn star. In the new image, Herbig-Haro 110 is seen showing off a turbulent streamer of gas, streaking across the picture. "Resembling a Fourth of July skyrocket, Herbig-Haro 110 is a geyser of hot gas from a newborn star that splashes up against and ricochets from the dense core of a cloud of molecular hydrogen," NASA said....
Two high school students from Texas and Louisiana are the winners of the 2012 Priscilla and Bart Bok Awards for their astronomy projects presented at the Intel Science and Engineering Fair in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in May. The awards were presented on May 18 by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) in partnership with the American Astronomical Society (AAS), supported by funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The first prize of $1,000 went to Piper Michelle Reid of...
Giant bubbles, towering pillars and cascading clouds of dust and gas fill the star-forming nursery of the Carina Nebula seen here in a stunning new view from Herschel. The Carina Nebula is some 7500 lightyears from Earth and hosts some of the most massive and luminous stars in our Galaxy, including double-star system eta Carinae, which boasts over 100 times the mass of our Sun. The total amount of gas and dust traced by ESA’s Herschel space observatory in this image is equivalent to...
Using radio and infrared telescopes, astronomers have obtained a first tantalizing look at a crucial early stage in star formation. The new observations promise to help scientists understand the early stages of a sequence of events through which a giant cloud of gas and dust collapses into dense cores that, in turn, form new stars. The scientists studied a giant cloud about 770 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. They used the European Space Agency's Herschel Space...
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope took this image of a baby star sprouting two identical jets (green lines emanating from fuzzy star). The jet on the right had been seen before in visible-light views, but the jet at left -- the identical twin to the first jet -- could only be seen in detail with Spitzer's infrared detectors. The left jet was hidden behind a dark cloud, which Spitzer can see through. The twin jets, in a system called Herbig-Haro 34, are made of identical knots of gas and dust,...
Astronomers have spotted young stars in the Orion nebula changing right before their eyes, thanks to the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The colorful specks -- developing stars strung across the image -- are rapidly heating up and cooling down, speaking to the turbulent, rough-and-tumble process of reaching full stellar adulthood. The rainbow of colors represents different wavelengths of infrared light captured by both Spitzer and...
Led by University of Illinois astronomy professor Tony Wong, the researchers published their findings in the December issue of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a popular galaxy among astronomers both for its nearness to our Milky Way and for the spectacular view it provides, a big-picture vista impossible to capture of our own galaxy. “If you imagine a galaxy being a disc, the LMC is tilted almost face-on so we can look down on it, which...
[ Watch the Video ] Observations made with the APEX telescope in submillimeter-wavelength light reveal the cold dusty clouds from which stars form in the Carina Nebula. This site of violent star formation, which plays host to some of the highest-mass stars in our galaxy, is an ideal arena in which to study the interactions between these young stars and their parent molecular clouds. Using the LABOCA camera on the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope on the plateau of...
Latest Star formation Reference Libraries
T Tauri -- T Tauri stars are a class of stars thought to represent extremely young pre-main sequence stars, in an early stage of life. They are seen near many molecular clouds in our galaxy. The first ones were found in 1945, identified by their optical variability and strong chromospheric lines. T Tauri stars have masses and temperatures similar to the Sun, but are significantly brighter. They have fast rotation rates, typically with a period of a few days, compared to a month for...
Star Formation -- Star formation is the process by which gas in molecular clouds gets transformed into stars. In the current paradigm of star formation, cores of molecular clouds (regions of specially high density) became gravitationally unstable, and start to concentrate. Part of the gravitational energy lost in the process is radiated in the infrared, another part increases the temperature of the core. The accretion of material happen partially though a circumstellar disc. When...
Molecular Cloud -- Molecular clouds are interstellar nebulae that have a density and size sufficient to permit the formation of H2, molecular hydrogen. However, this molecule is difficult to detect, and the molecule most used to trace the H2 is CO (carbon monoxide). The ratio between CO luminosity and H2 mass is roughly constant, although there are reasons to doubt this assumption in observations of some other galaxies. In the Milky Way, molecular clouds account for roughly one-half...
H II Region -- An H II region is an emission nebula associated with hot, young, blue stars, and star forming regions. H II, or singly-ionized hydrogen, is nebular gas ionized by ultraviolet light emitted by these hot, young stars of spectral type O and B. The sizes of H II regions are determined both by the amount of gas present, and by the luminosity of the O and B stars -- the more luminous the stars are, the larger the H II region can be. H II regions are found within the spiral...
Horsehead Nebula -- The Horsehead Nebula, a part of the optical nebula IC434 and also known as Barnard 33, was first recorded in 1888 on a photographic plate taken at the Harvard College Observatory. Its coincidental appearance as the profile of a horse's head and neck has led to its becoming one of the most familiar astronomical objects. It is, in fact, an extremely dense cloud projecting in front of the ionized gas that provides the pink glow so nicely revealed in this picture. We...
![Hubble\](/media/gallery/universe/thumbs/thumbs_iod-universe-042213.jpg "Hubble\")
![Protostar G35 Imagery From the SOFIA\](/media/gallery/sofia-stratospheric-observatory-for-infrared-astronomy/thumbs/thumbs_742079main_protostar_g35_fig_1a_1b_150_full_0.jpg "Protostar G35 Imagery From the SOFIA\")
