Newly developing stars shrouded in thick dust get their first baby pictures in these images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble took these infant star snapshots in an effort to learn how massive stars form.
Protostars are shrouded in thick dust that blocks light, but Hubble can detect the near-infrared emission that shines through holes formed by the protostar’s jets of gas and dust. The radiating energy can provide information about these “outflow cavities,” like their structure, radiation fields, and dust content. Researchers look for connections between the properties of these young stars – like outflows, environment, mass, brightness – and their evolutionary stage to test massive star formation theories.
These images were taken as part of the SOFIA Massive (SOMA) Star Formation Survey, which investigates how stars form, especially massive stars with more than eight times the mass of our Sun.
The high-mass star-forming region Cepheus A hosts a collection of baby stars, including one large and luminous protostar, which accounts for about half of the region’s brightness. While much of the region is shrouded in opaque dust, light from hidden stars breaks through outflow cavities to illuminate and energize areas of gas and dust, creating pink and white nebulae. The pink area is an HII region, where the intense ultra …