A young star in the Large Magellanic Cloud has formed a hot molecular core where interesting chemistry is just beginning.
Get Off My Lawn
There’s a surprising lack of young stars in the center of our galaxy.
Young Star, Young Planet
HL Tau is a young star, only about a million years old. Despite its young age, the star is already busy at making a family.
Light It Up
The image shows two colliding galaxies known as NGC 2207 and IC 2163. It’s a false-color image, where infrared is shown as dark red, visible is shown as normal, and x-ray is shown as purple. The first impression you might have is that the image looks awfully purple, and that means there are lots of x-ray sources in these two galaxies.
Mix It Up
When we look at a cluster of stars, we find that they are chemically similar. That is, the ratio of different elements (or metals in astronomy lingo) in various stars are basically the same. This is pretty much what we expect, since these stars all formed in the same stellar nursery, and haven’t drifted apart from each other. Just as human siblings share similarities due to their common genetic origins, sibling stars share chemical similarities due to their common origin. But what about stars with a common origin that scatter across the galaxy? Do they have a common chemical fingerprint?
Cosmic Rainbow
Recently I wrote about the average color of the universe, as determined by a survey of more than 230,000 galaxies. While knowing the overall color of these galaxies is a fun little factoid, it isn’t particularly useful from a scientific standpoint. However the color was determined by the average spectrum of the galaxies, which is quite scientifically useful. This “cosmic rainbow” tells us about the history of star formation in the universe.
Shadow Facts
Usually in astronomy we study objects by the amount of light they emit. Most regular matter gives of light in some form or another. Even the cold interstellar medium will emit some light at infrared or radio wavelengths. But one downside of this is that the light generally comes from the surface regions of an object. To study the interior of an object we generally have to use aspects of emitted light from the surface to determine properties of the interior. For bright objects like stars this works pretty well, but for dim objects like dark interstellar clouds this is more of a challenge.
Centrifuge
IRAS 04368+2557 is a protostar about 450 light years from us. It is a particularly young protostar, at about 300,000 years. Because of its age and proximity, it provides an excellent opportunity to study the early stages of stellar and planetary formation.
Second Generation
A new star has been discovered that was born from the very first stars of the universe. We can identify it by its particularly low metallicity.
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