Carina Nebula Nursery Reveals New Details of Star Birth and Rearing (VIDEO)

Astronomers have taken a closer look at one of the most active star-forming regions in the galaxy. The new findings may give astronomers a better understanding of the process that may have helped form the sun 4.5 billion years ago.

"Most stars form in giant molecular clouds, regions where the density of matter is sufficient for hydrogen atoms to pair up and form H2 molecules," said Patrick Hartigan, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The Carina Nebula is the ideal place to observe how this happens because there are dozens of examples of forming stars at various stages of development."

The Carina Nebula spans more than 100 light-years and is actually visible to the naked eye as a glowing patch in the Milky Way. The Carina Nebula plays home for thousands of stars similar in mass to the sun and 70 O-type stars, which are stars with a mass between 15 and 150 times the mass of the sun. O-stars burn hot and bright and die young-within 10 million years. These massive stars actually play a huge role in the lives of less-massive solar-type stars since they evaporate and disperse dust and gas.

The ultraviolet radiation from these massive stars ionizes molecular hydrogen. As the radiation evaporates the molecular cloud, the stars carve pillars and clear the space around smaller stars that exist nearby. This carving process marks one stage of the destruction of the molecular cloud.

"There is a huge variety in Carina, in part because it is so large," said Hartigan. "It spans more than a degree on a side, which means that it covers more of the sky than four full moons. In addition, Carina is young enough to have a great deal of ongoing star formation. But it is also old enough that the most massive stars have cleared away enough material to reveal a dizzying array of globules and pillars."

The latest observations reveal a bit more about the system and the stars there. More specifically, they shed some light on the structures located in this system and how they form.

"We observe two star clusters in which the pillars are being carved both from within, by young, newly formed stars inside the pillar, and from without by O-type stars," said Hartigan. "It appears that the stars in the cluster already existed before the O-stars evaporated the cloud material, which implies that triggering did not create these clusters. Our images are shaper and deeper than previous ones, and they provide the best snapshot so far of a massive star-formation region at one point in time."

The findings are published in The Astronomical Journal.

For more information, check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.

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