NASA is showing off a new kind of baby picture: portraits of massive stars still in the womb. Using the Hubble Space Telescope's infrared vision, astronomers captured rare views of protostars—young, still-forming stars wrapped in dense clouds of gas and dust. Visible light can't escape those cocoons, but near-infrared wavelengths slip through gaps carved by jets of material blasting from the infant stars' poles, per the agency, giving researchers a way to study how the biggest stars in the galaxy come together.
The images are part of the SOFIA Massive Star Formation Survey, which focuses on stars more than eight times the mass of the sun. In regions like Cepheus A, shown in one of the images, about 2,400 light-years away, Hubble reveals glowing clouds of pink, orange, and blue gas punctured by dark dust lanes and scattered blue stars. One especially bright protostar there accounts for roughly half the region's light, flooding surrounding hydrogen gas with ultraviolet radiation and turning it into a glowing H II region. Called HW2, the photostar has about 16 solar masses, reports Phys.org.
Closer to home in the Milky Way, Hubble zeroed in on several other nurseries, per NASA: G033.91+0.11, where a hidden protostar lights up a reflection nebula; GAL-305.20+00.21, where a buried young star energizes an emission nebula; and IRAS 20126+4104 in Cygnus, a hot, luminous B-type protostar whose high-speed jets light up a compact patch of ionized hydrogen. By comparing these environments—their outflows, mass, brightness, and surrounding dust—scientists hope to test competing theories about how massive stars grow from cold, dark clouds into some of the most powerful objects in the universe.
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