Beautiful stellar births produce extraordinary fine structures in interstellar space.
It’s called the Infrared Chameleon Nebula, and lies about 520 light-years away, in the range . New image From NSF NOIRLab’s Gemini International Observatory in Chile, he appears in the sky like the wings of a pale butterfly.
However, at its core, covered in dust, the turbulent processes that occur disappear as the stars unite.
The stars are strong bodies, and so is their birth. They form when dense clumps collapse into a cloud of molecular gas, rotating under its own gravity.
As it spins, matter is pulled into an accretion disk that feeds the growing protostar—a mass of gas that will become a star.
As the protostar grows, it begins to generate strong stellar winds, and the material falling into the protostar begins to interact with its magnetic field. This substance flows along magnetic field lines to the poles, where it is propelled into space in the form of a powerful jet of plasma.
That’s what astronomers think we’re looking at using the Infrared Chameleon Nebula (so named because it glows brightly in infrared, even though this image is at optical wavelengths).
The ‘wings’ are tunnels excavated from the gas cloud around the star by one of the protostellar jets.
Infrared Chameleon Nebula. (Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA)
Light from the tiny star then illuminates this cavity from within, reflecting off the gaseous structures to create what we call a reflection nebula.
The star itself is obscured by a dark vertical line, visible at its narrowest point.
This, to our understanding, is the protostar’s accretion disk, seen from the edge. The red dot to the right of this disk from our perspective is the point where the mass of matter emanating from the star collides with the surrounding gas.
This process creates short-lived bright spots of blur known as Herbig-Haro.Object. This designator is known as the HH 909A. Astronomers who observe closely can observe changes in the Herbig-Haro object on a timescale of just a few years.
The wind and radiance coming from the star also had another effect. They blow up the material around the protostar, eventually cutting off its gas supply and thus its ability to grow further.
By then, the star should have gained enough mass to generate enough pressure and heat for its core to ignite nuclear fusion, and kicked it into the main sequence as a full star.
You can download the full size version and wallpapers of this image At NOIRLab.
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