Stars are also born – they form when clouds of gas and dust clump together under their own gravity. When enough mass has accumulated, the pressure and temperature rise sharply. When a temperature of more than 15 million °C and a pressure of about 200 billion times that of the Earth’s atmosphere are reached, fusion reactions occur: two atomic nuclei fuse to form a new nucleus, converting mass into energy. This radiates from the young star.
However, the process of star formation is more complex than illustrated here, and astronomers don’t fully understand it yet. For example, it is still unclear how many stars will form from a cloud, how massive they will be and how many planets they will orbit. To fill this gap, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have spent the past five years building a massive map of five nearby star-forming regions. The VISIONS atlas is made up of no fewer than one million individual infrared images.
The young stars cannot be viewed directly because they are obscured by the dust around them. In the infrared spectrum captured by the VIRCAM infrared camera on the Chile-based VISTA telescope, the newly formed young stars shine brightly through the dust layers.
Stefan Meingast, an astronomer at the University of Vienna and lead author of the new study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, said in a statement from ESO: “In these images we can see even the faintest light sources, such as stars that are much less heavier than the sun, allowing us to discover objects that have never been seen before.”
According to research leader João Alves of the University of Vienna, the research team has collected so much data that it is now even possible to understand the movement of the stars. You can now observe these “baby stars” over several years and measure how they leave their “parent clouds,” Alves explains. This is not an easy task, because the apparent displacement of these stars from Earth is as small as the width of a hair at a distance of ten kilometers.
The star-forming regions considered in the atlas are the constellations Orion, Ophiuchus, Chameleon, Corona Australis, and Lupus. They are all less than 1,500 light-years from Earth and cover much of the sky.
The VISIONS Atlas has tremendous lasting value to the astronomical community, says ESO astronomer Monika Petr-Gotzens, who was involved in the research. It will keep astronomers busy for years to come and a host of projects will build on these findings. The atlas forms the basis for future observations, for example with the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in Chile, which should be operational by the end of the decade. (i.e)
Source: Blick
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