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.
How will the future newborn stars eradicate the current ones?
Hi Sarah,
Not quite sure what you mean. But, let me take a stab at answering. Newborn stars will evolve along whatever path their mass allows them to take. IF a newborn star is very very massive, it will live a short life and will likely explode as a supernova. That explosion could affect any nearby stars, although it may not eradicate them. If a newborn star evolves to become more like the Sun, its death process takes it from being a yellowish white star to a red giant, and then eventually it shrinks down to become a white dwarf. During the process, it sheds its outer layers, and those move out through space as clouds of gas and dust. The resulting nebula with a star is called a planetary nebula. Unless there’s a star quite close by, it’s not likely a planetary nebula is going to hurt it.
Newborn stars DO eat away at the clouds of gas and dust where they formed, and that chokes off the supply of star-making “stuff” for the next generation of stars.
Other than that, about the only other ways I could think of a star eradicating another star would be in a stellar collision or something like that. Astronomers DO see those, particularly in the crowded cores of globular clusters.
Hope this helps.