Stellar Nursery Reveals Solar Prominences-Like Gas Loops

Investigators with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) recently managed to snap an interesting view of the stellar nursery called NGC 3582, which is located in the larger RCW 57 star-forming region of the Milky Way. The new image reveals interesting structures within the gas clouds.

The tendrils the ESO team observed bear an amazing similarity to plasms prominences developing on the surface of our own Sun during periods of solar maximum. The difference between the two is that the ones in space occur at significantly larger scales.

Using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope, astronomers with the ESO La Silla Observatory in Chile managed to capture the structure in exquisite detail and color, providing an unprecedented, clear image into this amazing stellar nursery.

Such objects are usually made up of vast amounts of hydrogen gas, which come together and start to agglomerate against certain centers of gravity. As the time passes, the massive accumulation of hydrogen that was the initial cloud gets fragmented in several smaller clouds.

As these newly-formed structures reach a critical mass, they become too heavy to support themselves, and implode under the gravitational pull they generate. As this happens, friction between the gas molecules causes the hydrogen to ignite and begin nuclear fusion.

If the cloud had sufficient gas before collapsing, then a new star is born. Areas in which this process is happening constantly are called stellar nurseries, and NGC 3582 is one of them. The larger region, RCW 57, is simply an agglomeration of several stellar nurseries.

The new image reveals that the structure targeted by the Wide Field Imager contains a large number of loops that looks as if they were produced by perturbations in the gas clouds caused by dying stars.

Inside such tightly-packed cosmic structures, if a star goes supernova, then its effects are very widespread, and go a long way towards influencing the next generation of new stars the nursery it exploded in will produce.

In the case of NGC 3582, the entire area is filled by supernova-produced loops, but the glow apparent throughout the image is caused by the intense ultraviolet radiations emitted by newly-formed stars.

“Some of the stars forming in regions like NGC 3582 are much heavier than the Sun. These monster stars emit energy at prodigious rates and have very short lives that end in explosions as supernovae,” the ESO team explains in a press release.

“The material ejected from these dramatic events creates bubbles in the surrounding gas and dust. This is the probable cause of the loops visible in this picture,” they go on to say.