What we see is a beautiful stellar nursery located in the constellation of Gemini. With the Hubble Space Telescope up and running again, we get fantastic snapshots like this one again: new stars emerging from a ‘stellar nursery’ in deep space .
Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) took a picture of a star farm, known as AFGL 5180, located about 5,000 light years from Earth. The nursery is made up of dust and gas and is one of the many regions of space where stars are born.
“Stars are born in dusty environments and, although this dust generates spectacular images, it can prevent astronomers from seeing stars embedded in it,” NASA wrote in a statement.
In the image, a ‘massive’ star begins to form and pierces through the clouds. The light reaches the Earth illuminating the hollows, as if it were a “lighthouse that pierces the storm clouds”.
The constellation Gemini is made up of two stars: Pollux and Castor. Pollux is 33 light-years from Earth and is “an evolved red giant star twice as massive” as the sun, NASA said. In contrast, Castor is 51 light-years distant and is a main sequence blue star, 2.7 times the size of the sun.
Star farms
Stars are formed from clouds of dust and gas called molecular clouds or stellar nurseries. Each stellar nursery in the universe can form thousands or even tens of thousands of new stars during its lifetime.
Referencia: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. C. Tan (Chalmers University & University of Virginia), R. Fedriani (Chalmers University); Acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt
