ESO: Newborn Stars Will Rip Apart Their Stellar Nursery - Video

Massive young stars that will eventually destroy their own stellar nursery shine brightly in a dazzling new photo.

Cosmic gas cloud Gum 15, which lies 3,000 light-years from Earth, is busily giving birth to huge stars that are, in turn, shaping the cloud's weird structure.

That activity will eventually lead to the nebula's death, according to representatives of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

The cloud consists of a collection of ionized hydrogen gas (HII), hydrogen atoms whose electrons were stripped by ultraviolet light.

It also includes one of the "culprit" stars in the future murder: HD 74804, a star visible at the center of the new image.

This chart shows the location of the star formation region Gum 15 (red circle) in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sails). 

Credit: ESO, IAU and Sky & Telescope

"Once the newly minted stars have passed through their infant stages, strong winds of particles will stream away from these large stars, sculpting and dispersing the gases around them," ESO officials wrote in a statement.

"When the most massive of these stars begin to die, Gum 15 will die with them," the researchers added.

"Some stars are so large that they will go out with a bang, exploding as supernovae and dispersing the region's last traces of HII, leaving behind just a cluster of infant stars."

Astronomers believe stars form in massive clouds of material such as this one, which are known as nebulas.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the cosmos, and is found in Earth's own sun (along with helium, which is produced as the sun fuses hydrogen in its core).

Gum 15 is an example of a so-called "HII region." It is one of many irregular shapes spotted by scientists around the cosmos.

The nebula's weird design comes from its irregular distribution of gas and dust, ESO stated.

This richly detailed new view from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the star formation region Gum 15. 

 Credit: ESO

Other famous examples of HII regions are found in the Eagle Nebula (home of the famous "Pillars of Creation" captured by the Hubble Space Telescope) and the Orion Nebula.

ESO captured the new image using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Gum 15 is located in the southern constellation Vela (the Sails).

Gum gets its name from the late Australian astronomer Colin Gum, who created a catalogue of HII regions published in 1955.

ALMA: 'Death stars' in Orion blast planets before they even form - Video

This artist's concept shows two proplyds, or protostars, around a massive O-type star. 

The nearer proplyd is having its planet-forming dust and gas blasted away by the radiation from the star. 

The farther proplyd is able to retain its planet-making potential. 

Credit: NRAO /AUI /NSF, B. Saxton

The Orion Nebula is home to hundreds of young stars and even younger protostars known as proplyds.

Many of these nascent systems will go on to develop planets, while others will have their planet-forming dust and gas blasted away by the fierce ultraviolet radiation emitted by massive O-type stars that lurk nearby.

A team of astronomers from Canada and the United States has used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the often deadly relationship between highly luminous O-type stars and nearby protostars in the Orion Nebula.

Their data reveal that protostars within 0.1 light-years (about 600 billion miles) of an O-type star are doomed to have their cocoons of dust and gas stripped away in just a few millions years, much faster than planets are able to form.

Rita Mann

"O-type stars, which are really monsters compared to our Sun, emit tremendous amounts of ultraviolet radiation and this can play havoc during the development of young planetary systems," remarked Rita Mann, an astronomer with the National Research Council of Canada in Victoria, and lead author on a paper in the Astrophysical Journal.

"Using ALMA, we looked at dozens of embryonic stars with planet-forming potential and, for the first time, found clear indications where protoplanetary disks simply vanished under the intense glow of a neighbouring massive star."

Many, if not all, Sun-like stars are born in crowded stellar nurseries similar to the Orion Nebula.

Over the course of just a few million years, grains of dust and reservoirs of gas combine into larger, denser bodies.

Left relatively undisturbed, these systems will eventually evolve into fully fledged star systems, with planets, large and small and ultimately drift away to become part of the galactic stellar population.

Astronomers believe that massive yet short-lived stars in and around large interstellar clouds are essential for this ongoing process of star formation.

At the end of their lives, massive stars explode as supernovas, seeding the surrounding area with dust and heavy elements that will get taken up in the next generation of stars.

These explosions also provide the kick necessary to initiate a new round of star and planet formation, but while they still shine bright, these larger stars can be downright deadly to planets if an embryonic solar systems strays too close.



"Massive stars are hot and hundreds of times more luminous than our Sun," said James Di Francesco, also with the National Research Council of Canada.

"Their energetic photons can quickly deplete a nearby protoplanetary disks by heating up its gas, breaking it up, and sweeping it away."

James Di Francesco

Earlier observations with the Hubble Space Telescope revealed striking images of proplyds in Orion.

Many had taken on tear-drop shapes, with their dust and gas trailing away from a nearby massive star.

These optical images, however, couldn't reveal anything about the amount of dust that was present or how the dust and gas concentrations changed in relation to massive stars.

The new ALMA observations detected these and other never-before-imaged proplyds, essentially doubling the number of protoplanetary disks discovered in that region.

"Taken together, our investigations with ALMA suggest that extreme UV regions are not just inhospitable, but they're downright hazardous for planet formation. With enough distance, however, it's possible to find a much more congenial environment," said Mann.

"This work is really the tip of the iceberg of what will come out of ALMA; we hope to eventually learn how common solar systems like our own are."

Journal Reference: Rita K. Mann, James Di Francesco, Doug Johnstone, Sean M. Andrews, Jonathan P. Williams, John Bally, Luca Ricci, A. Meredith Hughes, Brenda C. Matthews. ALMA OBSERVATIONS OF THE ORION PROPLYDS. The Astrophysical Journal, 2014; 784 (1): 82 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/784/1/82

ESA ESO APEX Telescope Reveals Spectacular 'Fiery Ribbon' in Orion Nebula

This dramatic new image of cosmic clouds in the constellation of Orion reveals what seems to be a fiery ribbon in the sky. 

The orange glow represents faint light coming from grains of cold interstellar dust, at wavelengths too long for human eyes to see. 

CREDIT: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2

APEX telescope in Chile has captured stunning new photos of a cosmic ribbon shimmering in the Orion nebula more than 1,000 light-years from Earth.

The new images — released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) today (May 15) — show what scientists described as a "fiery ribbon" of red gas and dust shining in the constellation Orion's belt.

The ribbon is a small part of a huge star-forming region of the universe.

ESO scientists used the APEX telescope in Chile to craft a video tour of the clouds of dust that combine to create new stars.

"The large bright cloud in the upper right of the image is the well-known Orion Nebula, also called Messier 42," ESO officials wrote in a news release.

"It is readily visible to the naked eye as the slightly fuzzy middle 'star' in the sword of Orion. The Orion Nebula is the brightest part of a huge stellar nursery where new stars are being born, and is the closest site of massive star formation to Earth."



Although the clouds of dust and gas in the red-tinted image might look as if they're burning hot, they are actually freezing cold.

ESO's APEX telescope in Chile took the photo in wavelengths invisible to the human eye. In this image, the hottest object glow blue while the coolest have an orange tint.

Orion Nebula Image: Technicolour Dreamcoat

The dazzling Orion Nebula found in the famed constellation of the same name bursts with colour in this beautiful night sky image.

Astrophotographer Reinhold Wittich took this tremendous photo from his backyard observatory in Germany.

The Orion Nebula, also known as M42, is located 1,500 light-years away and is about 40 light-years across.

The main nebula actually includes the M42 nebula shown here, and the nebula M43, which is not. It can be easily spotted with the unaided eye near the belt of the three stars in the constellation Orion.

The vivid colours in the star-forming region are caused by the emission of oxygen and hydrogen gas.

This nebula houses a bright cluster of stars called the Trapezium along with several stellar nurseries containing hot young stars, stellar jets and proplyds.

The Orion Nebula: The Hearthstone of Creation

The Orion nebula is featured in this sweeping image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. 

The constellation of Orion is prominent in the evening sky throughout the world from about December through April of each year.

The nebula (also catalogued as Messier 42) is located in the sword of Orion, hanging from his famous belt of three stars.

The star cluster embedded in the nebula is visible to the unaided human eye as a single star, with some fuzziness apparent to the most keen-eyed observers. Because of its prominence, cultures all around the world have given special significance to Orion.

The Maya of Mesoamerica envision the lower portion of Orion, his belt and feet (the stars Saiph and Rigel), as being the hearthstones of creation, similar to the triangular three-stone hearth that is at the center of all traditional Maya homes.

The Orion nebula, lying at the center of the triangle, is interpreted by the Maya as the cosmic fire of creation surrounded by smoke.

This metaphor of a cosmic fire of creation is apt. The Orion nebula is an enormous cloud of dust and gas where vast numbers of new stars are being forged.

It is one of the closest sites of star formation to Earth and therefore provides astronomers with the best view of stellar birth in action.

Many other telescopes have been used to study the nebula in detail, finding wonders such as planet-forming disks forming around newly forming stars.

WISE was an all-sky survey giving it the ability to see these sites of star formation in a larger context.

This view spans more than six times the width of the full moon, covering a region nearly 100 light-years across. In it, we see the Orion nebula surrounded by large amounts of interstellar dust, colored green.

Astronomers now realize that the Orion nebula is part of the larger Orion molecular cloud complex, which also includes the Flame nebula.

This complex in our Milky Way galaxy is actively making new stars. It is filled with dust warmed by the light of the new stars within, making the dust glow in infrared light.

Colour in this image represents specific infrared wavelengths. Blue represents light emitted at 3.4-micron wavelengths and cyan (blue-green) represents 4.6 microns, both of which come mainly from hot stars.

Relatively cooler objects, such as the dust of the nebulae, appear green and red. Green represents 12-micron light and red represents 22-micron light.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

LL Ori and the Orion Nebula

This esthetic close-up of cosmic clouds and stellar winds features LL Orionis, interacting with the Orion Nebula flow. 

Adrift in Orion's stellar nursery and still in its formative years, variable star LL Orionis produces a wind more energetic than the wind from our own middle-aged Sun.

As the fast stellar wind runs into slow moving gas a shock front is formed, analogous to the bow wave of a boat moving through water or a plane traveling at supersonic speed.

The small, arcing, graceful structure just above and left of center is LL Ori's cosmic bow shock, measuring about half a light-year across.

The slower gas is flowing away from the Orion Nebula's hot central star cluster, the Trapezium, located off the upper left corner of the picture.

In three dimensions, LL Ori's wrap-around shock front is shaped like a bowl that appears brightest when viewed along the "bottom" edge.

The beautiful picture is part of a large mosaic view of the complex stellar nursery in Orion, filled with a myriad of fluid shapes associated with star formation.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team

NASA - Orion's Rainbow of Infrared Light

This new view of the Orion Nebula highlights fledgling stars hidden in the gas and clouds.

It shows infrared observations taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel mission, in which NASA plays an important role.

Stars form as clumps of this gas and dust collapses, creating warm globs of material fed by an encircling disk. 

These dusty envelopes glow brightest at longer wavelengths, appearing as red dots in this image. 

In several hundred thousand years, some of the forming stars will accrete enough material to trigger nuclear fusion at their cores and then blaze into stardom.

Spitzer is designed to see shorter infrared wavelengths than Herschel. By combining their observations, astronomers get a more complete picture of star formation.

The colours in this image relate to the different wavelengths of light, and to the temperature of material, mostly dust, in this region of Orion.

Data from Spitzer show warmer objects in blue, with progressively cooler dust appearing green and red in the Herschel datasets.

The more evolved, hotter embryonic stars thus appear in blue.

Infrared data at wavelengths of 8.0 and 24 microns from Spitzer are rendered in blue. Herschel data with wavelengths of 70 and 160 microns are represented in green and red, respectively.

This image was released on Feb. 29, 2012.

Image Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/IRAM

The constellation of Orion: Astronomy Picture

The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.

The brightest three stars on the far left are indeed the famous three stars that make up the belt of Orion. Just below Alnitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, is the Flame Nebula, glowing with excited hydrogen gas and immersed in filaments of dark brown dust.

Below the frame center and just to the right of Alnitak lies the Horsehead Nebula, a dark indentation of dense dust that has perhaps the most recognized nebular shapes on the sky. On the upper right lies M42, the Orion Nebula, an energetic caldron of tumultuous gas, visible to the unaided eye, that is giving birth to a new open cluster of stars.

Immediately to the left of M42 is a prominent bluish reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man that houses many bright blue stars. The above image, a digitally stitched composite taken over several nights, covers an area with objects that are roughly 1,500 light years away and spans about 75 light years.

NASA JPL: Making a Spectacle of Star Formation in Orion

Looking like a pair of eyeglasses only a rock star would wear, this nebula brings into focus a murky region of star formation. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope exposes the depths of this dusty nebula with its infrared vision, showing stellar infants that are lost behind dark clouds when viewed in visible light.

Best known as Messier 78, the two round greenish nebulae are actually cavities carved out of the surrounding dark dust clouds. The extended dust is mostly dark, even to Spitzer's view, but the edges show up in mid-wavelength infrared light as glowing, red frames surrounding the bright interiors.

Messier 78 is easily seen in small telescopes in the constellation of Orion, just to the northeast of Orion's belt, but looks strikingly different, with dominant, dark swaths of dust. Spitzer's infrared eyes penetrate this dust, revealing the glowing interior of the nebulae.

The light from young, newborn stars are starting to carve out cavities within the dust, and eventually, this will become a larger nebula like the "green ring" imaged by Spitzer (see PIA14104).

A string of baby stars that have yet to burn their way through their natal shells can be seen as red pinpoints on the outside of the nebula. Eventually these will blossom into their own glowing balls, turning this two-eyed eyeglass into a many-eyed monster of a nebula.

This is a three-color composite that shows infrared observations from two Spitzer instruments. Blue represents 3.6- and 4.5-micron light, and green shows light of 5.8 and 8 microns, both captured by Spitzer's infrared array camera. Red is 24-micron light detected by Spitzer's multiband imaging photometer.

ESO Image: Orion Nebula

This picture provided by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) shows an image of the Orion Nebula captured using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

The nebula offers astronomers a close-up view of a massive star-forming region to help advance our understanding of stellar birth and evolution

Constellation of Orion

Orion Deep Wide Field by Rogelio Bernal Andreo, California, USA, 10 June 2010. A panorama of a section of the constellation of Orion, including the 3 famous stars of the belt, the Horsehead Nebula and the Orion Nebula

Orion Nebula Gives Clues To Origin Of Life On Earth

What is intriguing is that amino acids in several meteorites show enantiomeric excesses of the same handedness as that seen in biological amino acids. Therefore, the process that produced the handedness of amino acids in the meteorites may provide clues to how homochirality developed in life forms on Earth. The larger question becomes how enantiomeric excesses can be produced and under what conditions.

How did life on Earth begin? One hypothesis is that terrestrial life began when organics were delivered from outer space during the early, heavy bombardment phase of Earth's development. We know that several meteorites (e.g., Murchison) have amino acids with properties similar to those seen in biological amino acids, the building blocks of life.

An international team of astronomers led by Fukue and Tamura of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan conducted research on the properties of light in a massive star-forming region (BN/KL nebula) of the Orion Nebula and have investigated a process that may have played a role in the development of life on Earth.

The origin of what is technically called "biomolecular homochirality" is a longstanding mystery and an important one to solve, since it characterizes most life forms on Earth.

Chirality refers to the handedness of an image or phenomenon, which is not identical to the mirror image of its counterpart, much as the right and left hands are similar in structure but are opposites and thus not the same.

Homochirality means that a group of molecules exhibit the same handedness. Therefore, biomolecular homochirality indicates an organic group of molecules that are characterized by the same handedness. Terrestrial living material displays homochirality and consists almost exclusively of one enantiomer, L-amino acid, one of a pair of amino acids.

What is intriguing is that amino acids in several meteorites show enantiomeric excesses of the same handedness as that seen in biological amino acids. Therefore, the process that produced the handedness of amino acids in the meteorites may provide clues to how homochirality developed in life forms on Earth. The larger question becomes how enantiomeric excesses can be produced and under what conditions.

The Sword and The Rose - Orion's Belt

The Sword and The Rose, 10 January 2010. Lying just south of the three stars that form Orion's belt, Orion's sword contains the Great Orion Nebula. This hotbed of star formation lies about 1350 light years away, making it the brightest and closest star forming region to Earth.

ESA's Planck Space Observatory: Orion Nebula

New images from ESA’s Planck space observatory reveal the forces driving star formation and give astronomers a way to understand the complex physics that shape the dust and gas in our Galaxy.

Star formation takes place hidden behind veils of dust but that doesn’t mean we can’t see through them.

Where optical telescopes see only black space, Planck’s microwave eyes reveal myriad glowing structures of dust and gas. Now, Planck has used this ability to probe two relatively nearby star-forming regions in our Galaxy.

The Orion region is a cradle of star formation, some 1500 light-years away. It is famous for the Orion Nebula, which can be seen by the naked eye as a faint smudge of pink.

Planck’s primary mission is to observe the entire sky at microwave wavelengths in order to map the variations in the ancient radiation given out by the Big Bang. Thus, it cannot help but observe the Milky Way as it rotates and sweeps its electronic detectors across the night sky.

NASA Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula, a stellar formation area located 1,350 million light years away, is captured by the Vista telescope, the biggest in the world, at Paranal hill, Chile

Picture: EPA / ESO