Looking for Star-forming Regions

Want to see places where stars are being born?  Easy. Just look for clouds of gas and dust called stellar nurseries. Tis is easier said than done, though.  Such regions aren’t always easy to study in detail, especially if we want to see them in distant galaxies through our blurry, ever-changing atmosphere.

To get around this problem, astronomers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain used an adaptive optics instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to zero in on 37 small, bright star-forming regions at the core of the galaxy NGC 253.  This galaxy, which lies somewhere around 13 million light-years away from us, is one of the brightest — and dustiest — spirals in the sky.

NGC 253 is about 70,000 light-years across and we see it nearly edge-on from our Earth-based point of view.

The core of this galaxy is bright with places where stars are being born — possibly as many as a hundred thousand massive young stars bursting into light. Astronomers have also found evidence that this galactic center also harbors a supermassive black hole similar to the one that lurks in the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy.

This might seem rather a dangerous place for star nurseries to be churning out young stars, since the neighborhood of a black hole is a pretty violent one. The gravitational forces alone can shred clouds of gas and dust, making it pretty difficult for material to condense to form stars. But, even near the core of our own Milky Way, astronomers have found evidence of stellar nurseries, cranking out massive young stars many times the mass of our own Sun. Granted, they don’t  live as long as the Sun, but they ARE forming.

The best way to understand these processes is to study them in as many places in as many galaxies (including our own) as we can. The evidence will eventually help astronomers understand more of the mechanics of star birth wherever it occurs.