They Destroy Their Birth Crêches

Stars form in great batches at a time, giving rise to groups of stars that are siblings of each other. The first thing these hot young  newborns do is eat away at the cloud of gas and dust that gave them birth. This results in some beautifully sculpted nebulae, such as NGC 3572, which lies in the southern constellation of Carina. Here’s a recent image of this area of space, taken using the Wide Field Imager on the 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s Chilean installation at La Silla.

Hot young stars come out of the nest blowing powerful winds and often sporting bipolar jets. All this action, plus strong ultraviolet radiation, eat away at the more fragile clouds of gas and dust that still surround them. Some parts of the cloud are thicker than others, and the radiation doesn’t quite destroy it all. That’s when we find objects astronomers call “elephant trunks” in the clouds. These are thicker condensations of the birth cloud, and may still contain protostars forming within.

The hot young stars are quite massive, much heavier and denser than the Sun. They typically live very short lives, tens of millions of years or so.  They go through their nuclear fuel (hydrogen, helium, etc.) very quickly.

By comparison, the Sun–which is a medium-mass star–is consuming its fuel at a more measured rate, and won’t run out for a few billion years yet. The Sun formed some 4.5 billion years ago and will probably be around in one form or another for another 5 billion years before ending its days as a swollen red giant, a planetary  nebula, and then finally, as a slowly cooling white dwarf.

The brightest of the cluster stars of NGC 3572 will blast through their fuel and end their short lives as supernova explosions. As they live their short, energetic lives, these stars will spread out through space, and the once-tight cluster shape will gradually disappear. Ten or so million years from now, these stars will turn this area of space and surrounding regions into a wonderland of expanding clouds leftover from their cataclysmic deaths.

If you click on the picture and enlarge it, you might see a strange little object that looks like a ring nebula. It might be a planetary nebula, but it could also have formed when a very hot, dense young star blew its winds out and created a bubble in the surrounding gas.  So, for now, astronomers will continue to study this region and follow the activities of these stars and what’s left of their starbirth crêche.

Next Mission to Mars on the Pad

I’m excited to see that the MAVEN mission to Mars is ready to go for launch on November 18 — next Monday. It’s been a long haul for the mission planners and scientists, and for a while there it looked like MAVEN might miss its launch window due to the GOP-led government shutdown. If that had happened, the mission could possibly have had to wait a couple of years to launch. But, the mission was declared an essential program due to the fact that the orbiter is going to be providing part of the communications link for other Mars missions already in place, and so the spacecraft made its deadlines.

MAVEN is not a “pretty pictures” mission. It is aimed at studying the atmosphere of Mars and will take critical measurements of the Martian upper atmosphere. What it finds will help scientists understand climate change in the Red Planet’s history. MAVEN, which stands for “Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution” mission, is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. Once it arrives at Mars, it will place itself into an orbit that lets it pass through and sample the entire upper atmosphere each time it goes through.  The spacecraft will investigate how the loss of Mars’ atmosphere to space determined the history of water on the surface. Water on Mars is a huge area of study now, and the relationship between water on Mars in the past and water found there now is still being determined.

To  learn more about MAVEN, check out the mission Web site here. And, if you can, tune in on Monday the 18th, when the mission is set  to launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket during a window of opportunity that opens at 1:28 p.m. to 3:28 p.m. Eastern Standard Time from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch complex 41. Cheer on this University of Colorado-based mission to Mars!