More than a million images captured over five years have formed stunning mosaics that show star-forming clouds close to Earth. This will help scientists around the world study these regions to better understand how stars are born, how they leave their “nursery”, among other poorly understood questions.
Carried out with the VISTA telescope, from the Paranal Observatory of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Chile, the VISIONS survey observed five star-forming regions, that is, where clumps of gas and dust coalesce until they collapse under their own gravity to become stars.
The observed regions are in the constellations of Orion, Ophiuchus, Chamaeleon, Corona Australis and Lupus, less than 1,500 light years away from Earth. The clouds are well known, but they still hold some secrets because the dense dust blocks the light of the baby stars that are born there.
Pictured above, for example, is the Lupus 3 region, where a dark cloud of cosmic dust snakes through the field of view. There, extremely hot stars are born from the collapse of masses of gas and dust.
Thanks to infrared instruments, scientists can not only see these young stars, but also see the inner details of the clouds and much more. By capturing the images over the five-year period, astronomers will also be able to observe in the data the movement of baby stars in relation to their nurseries.
With the wealth of detail, the images contain “even the faintest light sources, such as stars much less massive than the Sun, revealing objects that no one has ever seen before,” says Stefan Meingast, an astronomer at the University of Vienna in Austria, and lead author of the study.
João Alves, an astronomer at the University of Vienna and principal investigator for VISIONS, said that the baby stars have been tracked so that scientists can figure out how they leave their parent clouds.
Such detail is likely to give astronomers around the world reason to scrutinize the five regions in search of answers about star birth. The study was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Finally, check out the video below and observe the region L1688, where new stars are born.
Source: Astronomy & Astrophysics; Via: THAT
