Washington, Jan 11 (ANI): A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has illustrated that most stars, likely including the sun, grew up in cosmic turmoil.
The image shows one of the most active and turbulent regions of star birth in our galaxy, a region called Cygnus X. The choppy cloud of gas and dust lies 4,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus the Swan.
Cygnus X was named by radio astronomers, since it is one of the brightest radio regions in the Milky Way.
Cygnus X, which spans an area of the sky larger than 100 full moons, is home to thousands of massive stars, and many more stars around the size of our sun or smaller. Spitzer has captured an infrared view of the entire region, which is bubbling with star formation.
"Spitzer captured the range of activities happening in this violent cloud of stellar birth," Joe Hora, the principal investigator from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said.
"We see bubbles carved out from massive stars, pillars of new stars, dark filaments lined with stellar embryos and more," he said.
The majority of stars are thought to form in huge star-forming regions like Cygnus X. Over time, the stars dissipate and migrate away from each other. It's possible that the sun was once packed tightly together with other, more massive stars in a similarly chaotic, though less extreme, region.
The turbulent star-forming clouds are marked with bubbles, or cavities, which are carved out by radiation and winds from the most massive of stars.
Those massive stars tear the cloud material to shreds, terminating the formation of some stars, while triggering the birth of others.
"One of the questions we want to answer is how such a violent process can lead to both the death and birth of new stars," Sean Carey, a team member from NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, said.
"We still don't know exactly how stars form in such disruptive environments," Carey added. (ANI)
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