Victoria Jaggard, physical sciences news editor
(Image: F. Comeron/ESO)
Hot young stars really know how to clear a room. This brilliant stellar cluster was born deep inside a cloud of dust and gas, which looks like dark smoke in this picture. As they have grown, the stars have sent out powerful ultraviolet radiation and fierce winds of charged particles that have blown away the surrounding debris.
Captured by a telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, the cloud is about 600 light years away and runs through the constellation Scorpius. The entire region, known as Lupus 3, is what astronomers call a stellar nursery.
Cool, dense material in the cloud collapsed to form the new stars. At first the cloud would have absorbed radiation from the stellar babies - only telescopes able to see in longer wavelengths of light, such as infrared, can spot infants like this.
Eventually, though, the stars got hot enough to burst free of the haze. These blue beauties are less than a million years old and have not yet started to burn via nuclear fusion in their cores. Instead their glow comes from heat as their gases continue to contract. Our sun was probably born in a similar fashion about 4.6 billion years ago, so studying stellar nurseries like Lupus 3 can help us understand the earliest stages of life for our star.
Young stars emerge from the Scorpion's smoke
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Young stars emerge from the Scorpion's smoke
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Young stars emerge from the Scorpion's smoke
