A set of high-powered telescopes have caught the glowing “streamers” of gas fireworks formed during an early stage of stellar development in a giant cluster.
That process may take a million years to complete, according to scientists who captured a new look at the star cluster formally known as G286.21 + 0.17. To represent the star cluster in all its glory, astronomers used two different instruments: the hubble space telescope, which provided a look at the existing stars in the cluster and the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, which provided a look at the gas that falls inward to form future stars.
“This illustrates how dynamic and chaotic the process of star birth is,” co-author Jonathan Tan of Chalmers University in Sweden and the University of Virginia, he said in a statement. “We see competing forces at work: gravity and cloud turbulence on one side, and stellar winds and radiation pressure from young stars on the other.”
Related: It is full of stars! Brilliant cluster captured in new images, video
“This process sculpts the region,” Tan said in the statement. “It is surprising to think that our own sun and our planets were once part of such a cosmic dance.”
The gas in that dance is colored based on how fast it moves relative to our sun. (That said, the cluster is about 8,000 light years away from Earth.) Pink purples represent slower moving gas, while blue purples represent faster moving gas. Scientists combined over 750 different ALMA photos to create the ending gas photo.
That gas is falling into the cluster thanks to the work of gravity, and once it completely collapses, it will become the material that the new stars are made of. But it is a slow process that takes place in a large system: the researchers suspect that it will take around a million years before the group finishes developing.
The research is described in two recent published articles in The Astrophysical Journal.
While astronomers enjoy the fireworks in star cluster G286.21 + 0.17, another team of astronomers unearthed their own celestial pyrotechnics.
Astronomers with the 4-meter Nicholas U. Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, part of the NOIRLab of the National Science Foundation, examined their files to find this image of cosmic fireworks in the NGC 925 galaxy.
“If you are looking for fireworks for the American celebration of July 4, look no further than the world of astronomy,” the researchers wrote in a statement. “The cosmic fireworks at the center of this image, the spiral galaxy NGC 925, resembles a large pinwheel, with a bright central bar and rotating spiral arms. The red explosions scattered by NGC 925 are star-forming eruptions, which they can be tracked by looking at the remarkable emission of alpha hydrogen. “
NGC 925 is about 20 million light years from Earth in the direction of the Triangulum (The Triangle) constellation.
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