Young Stars in Brilliant Cluster Paint a Spectacular Landscape in New Image

The Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope has captured a spectacular new image of a brilliant star cluster. The new picture reveals hot young blue-white stars that shine brightly amidst the backdrop of space, revealing a little bit more about the cluster and star formation.

Most stars do not form alone. Instead, they are created with many siblings around the same time from a single cloud of gas and dust. The star cluster shown in this new image, NGC 3572, is one of these clusters. Located in the southern constellation of Carina, it possesses stars that generate powerful stellar winds that tend to gradually disperse the remaining gas and dust from their surroundings.

In the lower part of the image, you can see a large chunk of the molecular cloud that gave birth to these young stars. Yet this cloud has been greatly affected by the powerful radiation coming from its smoldering offspring. The radiation not only makes it glow, but also sculpts the clouds into amazingly convoluted shapes, including bubbles, arcs and the dark columns that astronomers call elephant trunks.

One of the stranger features captured in the new picture, though, is the tiny ring-like nebula located slightly above the center of the image. Currently, astronomers are uncertain about the origin of this feature. However, they suspect that it's likely a dense leftover from the molecular cloud that formed the cluster, perhaps a bubble created around a very bright hot star. Others, though, believe that it might be some kind of odd shaped planetary nebula.

A star cluster like the one seen in this image may have stars that are the same age, but the span of their lives will all be different. The course of a star's life is largely determined by its mass, so the cluster will contain stars in various stages of their lives. This, in particular, shows astronomers how stars evolve.

Eventually, this star cluster will begin to change. The stars will burn their fuel and end their lives in violent supernova explosions, dispersing the remaining gas and stars in the cluster. For now, though, the image gives scientists a good picture of these relatively young stars in an amazing cluster.