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The Seagull Hatches a New Star

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Star Formation is Gorgeous!

This new image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory shows part of a stellar nursery nicknamed the Seagull Nebula. This cloud of gas, formally called Sharpless 2-292, looks like the head of the seagull. Its bright glowing red color is due to strong radiation from a very hot young star lurking at its heart. The detailed view was produced by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope. Courtesy ESO.

When you look at a star, it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that it came from a cold cloud of gas molecules and dust. Yet, that describes the nebulae where stars are born pretty well. Take the Seagull Nebula. It lies about 3,700 light-years away from us near the constellation Canis Major (the Big Dog) in the sky, and kind of looks like a sea gull with a bright spot or two in it. Those bright spots are newborn stars.  The image you see here was taken with the MPG/European Southern Observatory 2.2-meter telescope, using its Wide Field Imager.

This wide-field view captures the entire Seagull Nebula, formally called IC 2177. This view was created from images forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. Courtesy: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin. (Click to enlarge.)

So, one part of this complex of gas and dust clouds makes up the head of the cosmic sea gull. It’s glowing brightly (in red, near the bottom of the image) . What causes it fluoresce like that?  See the star in the center of the image? That’s a hot young star that formed in the nebula and its strong radiation is heating the gases and causing them to glow.

There are other hot young blue-white stars that hatched here in this stellar nursery, and their light bounces off of dust particles and shows up as a blue haze.

One of the reasons that I’m so taken with images of star birth regions is that they are always so beautiful. That beauty belies the fact that stellar nurseries are places of great destruction. The birth of a star eats up the cloud material. It carves out caverns and spaces, and sometimes the formation of a huge star chokes off the formation of smaller sibling stars that haven’t yet emerged from their nebular cocoons.

Our own Sun was born in a cloud of gas and dust some 4.5 billion years ago. It likely formed with other sibling stars, which have moved on and taken up new spots in the galaxy.

So, when you look at gorgeous images of star birth regions, you’re seeing something similar to the place where our own solar system formed, where the elements that make up our Sun, planets, moons, rings, comets, asteroids… and us… concentrated together in the distant past.