Herschel Space Observatory announced Tuesday that its Telescope has discovered some of the youngest stars ever recorded.
The Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency with NASA collaboration, was successful in capturing 15 images of some of the youngest stars ever to be recorded.
"Herschel has revealed the largest ensemble of such young stars in a single star-forming region," said Amelia Stutz, lead author of a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal and a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "With these results, we are getting closer to witnessing the moment when a star begins to form."
The 15 newly observed protostars turned up by surprise in a survey of the biggest site of star formation near our solar system, located in the constellation Orion. The discovery gives scientists a peek into one of the earliest and least understood phases of star formation.
The gravitational collapse of massive clouds of gas and dust has led to the formation of many stars. This transition from stray, cool gas to the ball of super-hot plasma is relatively quick by cosmic standards, lasting only a few hundred thousand years. Finding protostars in their earliest, most short-lived and dimmest stages is quite a challenge.
Astronomers had long investigated the stellar nursery in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, a vast collection of star-forming clouds, but had not seen the newly identified protostars until Herschel observed the region.
"Previous studies have missed the densest, youngest and potentially most extreme and cold protostars in Orion," Stutz said. "These sources may be able to help us better understand how the process of star formation proceeds at the very earliest stages, when most of the stellar mass is built up and physical conditions are hardest to observe."
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile also contributed to Herschel's findings. Herschel is the largest and costliest infra-red telescope ever to be sent in space. ESA sent it to space on a $1.4 billion mission in 2009.
