The area produces stars at a frantic pace

Feb 24, 2010 16:07 GMT  ·  By

Experts at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) released earlier today an amazing new view of the stellar nursery NGC 346. The formation, which is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of our smaller neighboring galaxies, is the brightest star-forming region discovered in the Cloud. It resides some 210,000 light-years away, in the direction of the constellation of Tucana, or the Tucan. The level of details captured in this image will most likely keep astronomers and astrophysicists busy for a while.

While it may appear to be static to us, NGC 346 is actually changing at a frantic pace, as far as cosmic timescales go. Massive interactions between light, wind, heat and other radiation have pushed cosmic gas away from most of the massive stars in the region. This is not necessarily a good thing as far as forming more stars goes, as hydrogen gas needs to clump together in considerable amounts, before falling under its own weight, and igniting to produce a new star. Within and around the nebula, the dispersed cosmic gas shines bright in a wide variety of wavelengths, due to the combined actions of so many external factors.

The appearance of the stellar nursery will change as new cosmic fireballs will develop. These structures will push the gas even further out, modifying the already loose contours of NGC 346. Astronomers observing it from our planet several thousands of years from now may not even recognize it as NGC 346 without our written documents. Even now, the space object is fairly massive, covering a distance that is about 50 times the distance between the Sun and its closest stellar neighbor, or roughly 200 light-years. In astronomical terms, the nursery is classified as an open stellar cluster, which means that most, if not all, of the stars within were formed by the same collapsed cloud of cosmic gas and dust.

Officials at ESO say that the large majority of clouds in the star-forming region are fairly young, with an average age of only several million years. It could be that the main reason why so many of the stars were born at once is the influence of strong stellar winds, originating from a very large star that lived in the area. These radiations compressed the gas until the clouds reached the necessary threshold for them to begin collapsing on themselves. In the process, massive amounts of gas became sufficiently excited to produce radiation of their own, similar to the glow neon signs produce in ads all over the world.

The new image depicting all of this has been captured from the ESO La Silla Observatory, in Chile, using the organization's MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope. The Wide Field Imager (WFI) was the primary instrument used for observing NGC 346. In the future, ESO plans to construct the world's largest “eye-in-the-sky,” the European Extremely Large optical/near-infrared Telescope, the E-ELT. This massive observatory will feature a 42-meter aperture, which will allow it to make out details that existing telescopes are simply incapable of seeing. In addition, ESO is also involved in the The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) project, which seeks to construct the largest radio-wavelength interferometry array in the world.