ESO La Silla observes Lives and deaths of sibling stars

In this image from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile young stars huddle together against a backdrop of clouds of glowing gas and lanes of dust. 

The star cluster, known as NGC 3293, would have been just a cloud of gas and dust itself about ten million years ago, but as stars began to form it became the bright group we see here. 

Clusters like this are celestial laboratories that allow astronomers to learn more about how stars evolve. 

Credit: ESO/G. Beccari

This beautiful star cluster, NGC 3293, is found 8000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina (The Keel).

This cluster was first spotted by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in 1751, during his stay in what is now South Africa, using a tiny telescope with an aperture of just 12 millimetres.

It is one of the brightest clusters in the southern sky and can be easily seen with the naked eye on a dark clear night.

Star clusters like NGC 3293 contain stars that all formed at the same time, at the same distance from Earth and out of the same cloud of gas and dust, giving them the same chemical composition.

As a result clusters like this are ideal objects for testing stellar evolution theory.

Most of the stars seen here are very young, and the cluster itself is less than 10 million years old. Just babies on cosmic scales if you consider that the Sun is 4.6 billion years old and still only middle-aged.

An abundance of these bright, blue, youthful stars is common in open clusters like NGC 3293, and, for example, in the better known Kappa Crucis cluster, otherwise known as the Jewel Box (NGC 4755).

These open clusters each formed from a giant cloud of molecular gas and their stars are held together by their mutual gravitational attraction but these forces are not enough to hold a cluster together against close encounters with other clusters and clouds of gas as the cluster's own gas and dust dissipates.

So, open clusters will only last a few hundred million years, unlike their big cousins, the globular clusters, which can survive for billions of years, and hold on to far more stars.

Despite some evidence suggesting that there is still some ongoing star formation in NGC 3293, it is thought that most, if not all, of the nearly fifty stars in this cluster were born in one single event but even though these stars are all the same age, they do not all have the dazzling appearance of a star in its infancy; some of them look positively elderly, giving astronomers the chance to explore how and why stars evolve at different speeds.

Take the bright orange star at the bottom right of the cluster. This huge star, a red giant, would have been born as one of the biggest and most luminous of its litter, but bright stars burn out fast.

As the star used up the fuel at its core its internal dynamics changed and it began to swell and cool, becoming the red giant we now observe.

Red giants are reaching the end of their life cycle, but this red giant's sister stars are still in what is known as the pre-main-sequence, the period before the long, stable, middle period in a star's life.

We see these stars in the prime of their life as hot, bright and white against the red and dusty background.

Star cluster NGC 3590, in the wake of Carina

This colourful new image from the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the star cluster NGC 3590. 

These stars shine brightly in front of a dramatic landscape of dark patches of dust and richly hued clouds of glowing gas. 

This small stellar gathering gives astronomers clues about how these stars form and evolve, as well as giving hints about the structure of our galaxy's pinwheeling arms. Credit: ESO/G. Beccari

This colorful new image from the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the star cluster NGC 3590.

These stars shine brightly in front of a dramatic landscape of dark patches of dust and richly hued clouds of glowing gas.

This small stellar gathering gives astronomers clues about how these stars form and evolve—as well as giving hints about the structure of our galaxy's pinwheeling arms.

NGC 3590 is a small open cluster of stars around 7500 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Carina (The Keel).

It is a gathering of dozens of stars loosely bound together by gravity and is roughly 35 million years old.

This cluster is not just pretty; it is very useful to astronomers. By studying this particular cluster, and others nearby, astronomers can explore the properties of the spiral disc of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

NGC 3590 is located in the largest single segment of a spiral arm that can be seen from our position in the galaxy: the Carina spiral feature.

The Milky Way has multiple spiral arms, long curved streams of gas and stars stretching out from the galactic centre.

These arms—two major star-filled arms, and two less populated minor arms—are each named after the constellations in which they are most prominent.

The Carina spiral feature is seen from Earth as a patch of sky heavily populated with stars, in the Carina-Sagittarius minor arm.

The name of this arm, Carina, or The Keel, is quite appropriate.

These spiral arms are actually waves of piled up gas and stars sweeping through the galactic disc, triggering sparkling bursts of star formation and leaving clusters like NGC 3590 in their wake.

By finding and observing young stars like those in NGC 3590, it is possible to determine the distances to the different parts of this spiral arm, telling us more about its structure.

Typical open clusters can contain anything from a few tens to a few thousands of stars, and provide astronomers with clues about stellar evolution.

The stars in a cluster like NGC 3590 are born at around the same time from the same cloud of gas, making these clusters perfect test sites for theories on how stars form and evolve.

This image from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla, shows the cluster and the gas clouds surrounding it, which glow in orange and red hues due to the radiation coming from nearby hot stars. WFI's large field of view also captures a colossal number of background stars.

To obtain this image, multiple observations were made using different filters to capture the different colours of the scene.

This image was created by combining images taken in the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum, and a special filter that collected only light coming from glowing hydrogen.

ESO Wide Field Imager Image: Young stars paint spectacular stellar landscape

The Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile has captured the best image so far of the star cluster NGC 3572, a gathering of young stars, and its spectacular surroundings. 

This new image shows how the clouds of gas and dust around the cluster have been sculpted into whimsical bubbles, arcs and the odd features known as elephant trunks by the stellar winds flowing from the bright stars. 

The brightest of these cluster stars are heavier than the Sun and will end their short lives as supernova explosions. 

Credit: ESO/G. Beccari

Astronomers at ESO have captured the best image so far of the clouds around the star cluster NGC 3572.

This image shows how these clouds of gas and dust have been sculpted into bubbles, arcs and the odd features known as elephant trunks by the stellar winds flowing from this gathering of hot stars.

The brightest of these cluster stars are much heavier than the Sun and will end their short lives as supernova explosions.

Most stars do not form alone, but with many siblings that are created at about the same time from a single cloud of gas and dust. NGC 3572, in the southern constellation of Carina (The Keel), is one of these clusters.

It contains many hot young blue-white stars that shine brightly and generate powerful stellar winds that tend to gradually disperse the remaining gas and dust from their surroundings.

The glowing gas clouds and accompanying cluster of stars are the subjects of a new picture from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.

In the lower part of the image a big chunk of the molecular cloud that gave birth to these stellar youngsters still can be seen.

It has been dramatically affected by the powerful radiation coming from its smoldering offspring.

The radiation not only makes it glow with a characteristic hue, but also sculpts the clouds into amazingly convoluted shapes, including bubbles, arcs and the dark columns that astronomers call elephant trunks.

A strange feature captured in this image is the tiny ring-like nebula located slightly above the centre of the image.

Astronomers still are a little uncertain about the origin of this curious feature. It is probably a dense leftover from the molecular cloud that formed the cluster, perhaps a bubble created around a very bright hot star.

But some authors have considered that it may be some kind of oddly shaped planetary nebula—the remnants of a dying star.