Star Birth (and Murder) Spied in Cygnus X: Big Pic

Jan. 10, 2012 -- Baby stars don't get an easy ride during their early years; they are born into stellar nurseries bubbling with violence. One such nursery is the Cygnus X region of our galaxy, a nebula 4,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus the Swan, seen here in stunning clarity by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Cygnus X is known as one of the brightest radio-wave emitting sources in the Milky Way and is known to contain thousands of massive stars. As this Spitzer observation shows, it is also brimming with star birth, giving us a glimpse as to what it may have been like when our sun was just a toddler, before it was too old to hang out with its siblings and drifted deep into space to live a life in solitary.

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"Spitzer captured the range of activities happening in this violent cloud of stellar birth," said Joe Hora of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who is the principal investigator of the research. "We see bubbles carved out from massive stars, pillars of new stars, dark filaments lined with stellar embryos and more."

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Usually, these embryos are obscured from view by choking clouds of gas and dust, but through the infrared eyes of Spitzer, the huge quantities of heat generated through birthing a star can be seen. The infrared light passes straight through the fog, allowing us to spot baby stars erupt into existence.

But it's not quite time to light up your cigars in celebration of the newborns; infanticide by the older, massive stars embedded in Cygnus X is rife.

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Carved into the clouds, bubbles surrounding the most massive stars have been blasted out by intense radiation. If one of these stars drifts too close to one of the stellar babies, star birth can be snuffed out, effectively cutting the supply of fuel to the newborn. Needless to say, for those stellar embryos, it doesn't end well.

But one embryo's loss is another embryo's gain, and the pressure exerted by the outermost edges of the bubbles can ignite new star birth in other parts of the nebula.

Although Spitzer can see this life and death scenario play out in Cygnus X, astronomers are puzzled by how the star formation process can happen at all. "One of the questions we want to answer is how such a violent process can lead to both the death and birth of new stars," said Sean Carey, a team member from NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology. "We still don't know exactly how stars form in such disruptive environments."

ANALYSIS: Massive Star Birth Revealed

This particular Spitzer observation also shows filaments and pillars of dust beaded with young stars, often in close proximity to massive stars, perhaps giving a clue as to the process of star birth in such a turbulent region of the Milky Way.

"We have evidence that the massive stars are triggering the birth of new ones in the dark filaments, in addition to the pillars, but we still have more work to do," said Hora. "The biggest results from this survey are yet to come."

The Spitzer team presented these results at the American Astronomical Society meeting at Austin, Texas on Tuesday.

--by Ian O'Neill

Image: An infrared observation of the Cygnus X region of the Milky Way. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / J. Hora (CfA)