Telescopes Capture the Beauty of Star Creation

Normally when you see a picture this stunning, you assume it’s an “artist’s rendition”, but this is the real deal. By combining infrared, visible and X-ray light from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, ESO's New Technology Telescope (NTT) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope, scientists were able to create a genuinely ethereal portrait of a star at birth. The NTT visible-light images allowed astronomers to uncover glowing gas in the region. The multi-wavelength image also reveals some intriguing new questions about star formations thanks to the unusual combination of information.

NGC 346 is the brightest star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud, an irregular dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way at a distance of 210 000 light-years.
"NGC 346 is a real astronomical zoo," says Dimitrios Gouliermis of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and lead author of the paper describing the observations. "When we combined data at various wavelengths, we were able to tease apart what's going on in different parts of this intriguing region."

Small stars are scattered throughout the NGC 346 region, while massive stars populate its center. These massive stars and most of the small ones formed at the same time out of one dense cloud, while other less massive stars were created later through a process called "triggered star formation". Intense radiation from the massive stars ate away at the surrounding dusty cloud, triggering gas to expand and create shock waves that compressed nearby cold dust and gas into new stars. The red-orange filaments surrounding the centre of the image show where this process has occurred.

But another set of younger low-mass stars in the region, seen as a pinkish blob at the top of the image, couldn't be explained by this mechanism. "We were particularly interested to know what caused this seemingly isolated group of stars to form," says Gouliermis.

more:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/10/telescopes-capt.html

I see it too. :)

Well great, now I can see a pirate ship as well. But I still see the green guy sitting on the pot, too.

I think Freud would have found me entirely fascinating.


Nice pic, BTW. Thanks for posting.