The new infrared view of the North American Nebula. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Babies, toddlers and young adult stars can now be seen in a new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
The North American Nebula closely resembles the North American continent, even down to the Gulf of Mexico. But with Spitzer’s infrared view, the continent vanishes and a landscape of young stars appears.
Luisa Rebull of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, US, says in the press release “One of the things that makes me so excited about this image is how different it is from the visible image, and how much more we can see in the infrared than in the visible. The Spitzer image reveals a wealth of detail about the dust and the young stars here.”
Stars are born inside collapsing balls of dust and gas- as it collapses, it flattens out to form a disk that spins around with the forming star at the top. As the star ages, planets are believed to form out of these disks and the dust dissipates to form a ring, such as the Zodiacal dust around our own solar system.
Because the young stars are surrounded by dust, they are hidden in visible light images, but Spitzer’s infrared detectors can now locate them. Rebull and her team have found more than 2000 new stars, where there were previously only thought to be 200.
The images also reveal the early stages of a star’s life cycle, from early years to young adulthood, when they become parents to developing planets. Rebull says “”This is a really busy area to image, with stars everywhere, from the North American complex itself, as well as in front of and behind the region.”
“We refer to the stars that are not associated with the region as contamination. With Spitzer, we can easily sort this contamination out and clearly distinguish between the young stars in the complex and the older ones that are unrelated.”
