NASA just captured the formation of thousands of new stars through an infrared image.
Inflated by wind and radiation from newborn stars, the Spitzer Space Telescope shows a cloud of gas and dust full of bubbles, where each is filled with hundreds to thousands of stars and forms numerous dense clouds of gas and dust.
Based on what most astronomers know about cosmic bubbles, the figures found on the image are estimated to be ten to 30 light-years across. Although, it should be noted that determining the exact sizes of each bubble can be a challenge, especially since their distance from Earth is quite difficult to measure, and objects appear smaller the farther away they are.
Stellar winds are particles radiated by the stars themselves, and is the pressure of the light it produces—which can push the surrounding material outward and can occasionally produce a sharp borderline.
This active region of star formation is positioned inside our galaxy, the Milky Way, and in the constellation Aquila, also known as the Eagle. It is near the celestial equator in the northern sky and is the home of two well-known stars, Altair and Tarazed. It is also the 22nd biggest constellation in the sky, occupying an area of 652 square degrees in the fourth quadrant of the northern hemisphere (NQ4).
The yellow circles that are seen in the image taken by NASA's Spitzer telescope identify more than 30 bubbles, while the black vein-like formations flowing through the clouds are said to be regions of primarily opaque crisp dust and gas where even more new stars are likely to form.
A group of civilian observers called The Milky Way Project analyzed the image and aided in sorting through the enormous amount of images captured by the space telescope.
According to the observers, the so-called bubbles are "very powerful regions around young massive stars whose light and stellar winds have blown a bubble into the dusty clouds surrounding them." The starlight heats dust that is trapped in the bubble, which we can see glowing in infrared light. This is frequently called "heat radiation."
A lot of the circular features in the photos taken are formed by hot young stars as their winds and radiation sweep up the surrounding gas and dust from which they formed—very much like a snowplow that compresses the snow in its path. Sometimes, the swept-up material becomes dense enough for gravity to pull it together to form new stars. And because hot, massive stars only live for a few million years before exploding as supernovae, all of the bubbles represent regions of very recent star formation, so we can use them to map star formation activity throughout the Milky Way.
The Spitzer Space Telescope is NASA's final mission for its Great Observatories Program. This program is a group of four space-based observatories, where each will be observing the Universe in different kinds of light. It is designed to detect infrared radiation, which is primarily heat radiation, and is formed by The Cryogenic Telescope Assembly and The Spacecraft.
