The warmth of star birth

When stars are born, mayhem ensues. The gas and dust collapse to form the stars themselves, but when they switch on the stars blow out vast and terrible winds, which sculpt and carve the surrounding material. And while this chaos must create violence locally, when you take a step back it can be quite beautiful:

[Click to get the massively embiggened 10000 x 8000 pixel picture!]

This is an infrared image taken by the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA camera. It shows a region called R2 in the constellation of Monoceros (literally, "one horn" — it’s a unicorn!) where stars are being born at a furious rate. In the big version you can see shock waves from winds colliding with gas, streamers blown out as the winds escape the cloud, and other fantastic and surreal shapes.

Funny. It’s rare that I’ll see an astronomy image of a nebula and have no clue what object it is, but this was one of those cases. I knew it was a star-forming region, and I would’ve guessed it was in the IR, but which particular nebula it is I wouldn’t have been able to figure out. The shape, the structure, all of it is unfamiliar! And that’s what happens when we probe the skies in new wavelengths with sensitive cameras. In this case, too, the image is huge, covering an area of the sky more than a degree and a half across — that’s enough to cover the Moon 5 times!

VISTA is a 67 megapixel (yes, you read that right) camera designed to take surveys of the sky, big chunks of it at a time so that we can understand better what’s going on there on a larger scale. Most astronomical imagery covers an area of the sky you can block out with a thumbnail at arm’s length — and most Hubble images would be blocked by a grain of sand! We sometimes miss the big picture that way, and machines like VISTA help us fill in those very large blanks.

And we’ll need to know. In a million years, maybe two, the stars in the core of R2 are going to start exploding. Don’t worry, at a distance of 2700 light years they’re way too far to hurt us. But that’ll completely tear apart the nebula over time, and astronomers in that long-distant future will want to have basic maps of the area when it happens. These are our first steps toward creating them.

Related posts:

- Incredible VISTA of the cosmos

- The Orion VISTA

- Spectacular VISTA of the Tarantula

- Sculpting a barred galaxy