New ‘atlas’, made up of more than a million images, could help solve mysteries of the birth of stars
Astronomers
have found “objects that no one has ever seen before”, in a detailed new atlas
of the stars.
The
objects were found by scientists who pieced together more than one million
images taken from the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared
Survey Telescope for Astronomy (Vista) and pieced them into vast mosaics.
That atlas
of the stars shows young stars as they are being born, surrounded by thick
clouds of dust.
As well as
making for spectacular images, the observations could help scientists solve the
mysteries of how stars are born.
“In these
images we can detect even the faintest sources of light, like stars far less
massive than the Sun, revealing objects that no one has ever seen before,” says
Stefan Meingast, an astronomer at the University of Vienna in Austria and lead
author on the new study.
“This will
allow us to understand the processes that transform gas and dust into stars.”
Stars form
when clouds of gas and dust fall apart under their own gravity. But those same
clouds mean that it is hard to observe that process, and much of it remains
unknown – such as how many stars might come out of one cloud, and how many of
those will get their own planets.
To see
that process better, astronomers used the European Southern Observatory’s
telescope to capture light from within that dust, in infrared. By using those
infrared wavelengths, scientists are able to make visible what is normally
hidden from view.
Over a
period of five years, they examined five nearby star-forming regions and
gathered more than a million images. They were then stuck together into large
mosaics, so that the whole landscape could be viewed in detail.
Because
the areas were seen several times over a relatively long period, the atlas
shows not just the placement of stars but their movements, and could help
astronomers learn how young stars travel around. The data can show how baby
stars leave their parent clouds and what happens to them as they do.
It will
also serve as the foundation for further work, including observations from the
ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, which is being built now. “The ELT will allow
us to zoom into specific regions with unprecedented detail, giving us a
never-seen-before close-up view of individual stars that are currently forming
there,” said Meingast.