14 DAY TRIAL // Focusing on a region in the Milky Way about 2,400 light-years away from our planet, astronomers operating the NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope were recently able to obtain a new, highly-detailed view of the stellar nursery Cepheus B.
This cloud of molecular hydrogen is producing young, blue stars at a frantic pace, stirred by a number of large-scale phenomena affecting its structure. The explosion of old stars into supernovae is forcing the gas to mix further, triggering even more stellar formation.
Data from Spitzer are mostly concentrated in the lower parts of the image, and appear in red, green and blue. Chandra's image focuses on stars in and around the nebula, and its data are depicted here in violet.
Images such as this one provide astrophysicists with new data they can use to test their models of how stars form. At this point, several of these models are in direct competition, but the fact is that several of them may be correct, only in different circumstances.