New ‘atlas’, made up of more than a million images, could help solve mysteries of the birth of stars
Astronomers have found “objects that no one has ever seen
before”, in a detailed new atlas of the stars.
The objects were found by
scientists who pieced together more than one million images taken from the
European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for
Astronomy (Vista) and pieced them into vast mosaics.
That atlas of the stars shows young stars as they are being born, surrounded by
thick clouds of dust.
As well as making for
spectacular images, the observations could help scientists solve the mysteries
of how stars are born.
“In these images we can detect
even the faintest sources of light, like stars far 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 on the new
study.
“This will allow us to
understand the processes that transform gas and dust into stars.”
Stars form when clouds of gas and dust fall apart under their
own gravity. But those same clouds mean that it is hard to observe that
process, and much of it remains unknown – such as how many stars might come out
of one cloud, and how many of those will get their own planets.
To see that process better, astronomers used the European Southern
Observatory’s telescope to capture light from within that dust, in infrared. By
using those infrared wavelengths, scientists are able to make visible what is
normally hidden from view.
Over a period of five years,
they examined five nearby star-forming regions and gathered more than a million
images. They were then stuck together into large mosaics, so that the whole
landscape could be viewed in detail.
It will also serve as the
foundation for further work, including observations from the ESO’s Extremely
Large Telescope, which is being built now. “The ELT will allow us to zoom into
specific regions with unprecedented detail, giving us a never-seen-before
close-up view of individual stars that are currently forming there,” said
Meingast.
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