NASA鈥檚 Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered strings of baby stars adorning the Christmas Tree Cluster, a nearby stellar grouping embedded in dust and gas.
The cluster was named for the bright stars that trace out the triangular shape of a Christmas tree. But dust and gas block much of the visible light from objects within the 鈥渢ree鈥�.
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Now, Spitzer has used its Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS) and Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) to peer through the dust. It found a clutch of about two dozen baby stars. These have not yet heated their surroundings much, suggesting they are less than 100,000 years old.
Their positioning also suggests they are newly formed. They line up as if on the spokes of a bicycle wheel or the icy spines of a snowflake, probably along filaments of dust and gas in their natal cloud. 鈥淵ou have new stars forming in a line all along the filament,鈥� says MIPS team member Erick Young of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US. He and colleagues have nicknamed the group of baby stars the Snowflake Cluster.
But turbulence in the cloud kicks the stars to a speed of about 1 kilometre per second, which will effectively melt the crystalline pattern. 鈥淭he stars will eventually drift apart, and they鈥檒l lose the primordial pattern associated with the cloud,鈥� Young told 快猫短视频. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 why the Spitzer image is special 鈥� we鈥檙e able to catch the very youngest stars right after they鈥檝e been born.鈥�
The research will be published in January in the Astronomical Journal.
