“ESO’s VISTA Telescope Creates Infrared Atlas of Nearby Stellar Nurseries”

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Using ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), astronomers have created a comprehensive infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries. To this end, they have put together more than a million individual recordings. The large mosaics show young stars in the making, embedded in thick clouds of dust. These observations provide astronomers with a unique tool for deciphering the complex problem of star birth.

“On these images, we can detect even the faintest light sources, such as stars with a much lower mass than the sun, revealing objects that no one has ever seen before,” said Stefan Meingast, an astronomer at the University of Vienna, Austria, and lead author. of the new study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. ‘This gives us insight into the processes that convert gas and dust into stars.’

Stars form when clouds of gas and dust contract under their own gravity, but the details of how this happens are not fully understood. How many stars are born from a cloud? How heavy are they? How many stars will also have planets? To answer these questions, Meingast’s team examined five nearby star-forming regions using the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Using VISTA’s infrared camera VIRCAM, the team captured light emanating from deep within the dust clouds. ‘The dust obscures these young stars from our view, making them virtually invisible to our eyes. Only at infrared wavelengths can we look deep into these clouds and study the stars-to-be,” explains Alena Rottensteiner, also a PhD student at the University of Vienna and co-author of the study.

Called VISIONS, the study examines star-forming regions in the constellations Orion, Serpent-Bearer, Chameleon, Southern Crown and Wolf. These regions are less than 1,500 light-years away from us and cover a huge stretch of sky. VIRCAM’s field of view is the size of three full moons, making it ideally suited for mapping such immense areas. Over a period of five years, the team has made more than a million shots. The individual images were then assembled into the large mosaics presented here with their vast cosmic ‘landscapes’. The detailed panoramas show dark dust concentrations, glowing clouds, newborn stars and the distant background stars of the Milky Way.

Because each area has been photographed multiple times, the VISIONS data also allows astronomers to investigate the motions of young stars. “With VISIONS, we track these baby stars for years on end, which allows us to measure their displacements and learn how they leave their parent clouds,” explains João Alves, an astronomer at the University of Vienna and principal investigator of VISIONS. This is no easy task, because the apparent displacement of these stars from Earth is as small as the width of a human hair ten kilometers away. These measurements of star motions complement measurements from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission at visible wavelengths, where young stars cannot be seen due to the amount of dust in their surroundings.

Astronomers will enjoy the VISIONS Atlas for years to come. “The value to the astronomical community is great and long-lasting, which is precisely why ESO is pushing for public surveys such as VISIONS,” says Monika Petr-Gotzens, astronomer at ESO in Garching, Germany, and co-author of this study. In addition, VISIONS will lay the foundations for future observations with other telescopes, such as ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which is currently under construction in Chile and should become operational later this decade. “With the ELT, we can zoom in on specific areas with unprecedented precision, allowing us to get a closer look at the individual stars currently forming there than ever before,” concludes Meingast.

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