In the Dark

It’s been a busy day today,  so I’ve decided to be lazy and plunder the online stack of juicy Herschel images for a pretty picture to show. This one has done the rounds in the popular media recently, which is not surprising given how strange it looks.

Image Credits: ESA / PACS & SPIRE Consortium, Dr. Annie Zavagno, LAM, HOBYS Key Programme Consortia

This image shows a Galactic bubble (technically an HII emission region) called RCW 120 that contains an embryonic star that looks set to turn into one of the brightest stars in the Galaxy. It lies about 4300 light-years away. The star is not visible at these infrared avelengths but its radiation pressure pushes on the surrounding dust and gas. In the approximately 2.5 million years the star has existed, it has raised the density of matter in the bubble wall by so much that the material trapped there can now collapse to form new stars.

The bright knot to the right of the base of the bubble is an unexpectedly large, embryonic star, triggered into formation by the power of the central star. Herschel’s observations have shown that it already contains between 8-10 times the mass of our Sun. The star can only get bigger because it is surrounded by a cloud containing an additional 2000 solar masses.

Not all of that will fall onto the star, because even the largest stars in the Galaxy do not exceed 150 solar masses. But the question of what stops the matter falling onto the star is an astrophysical puzzle. According to theory, stars should stop forming at about 8 solar masses. At that mass they should become so hot that they shine powerfully at ultraviolet wavelengths exerting so much radiation pressure that it should push the surrounding matter away, much as the central star did to form this bubble in the first place. But this mass limit is must be exceeded sometimes, otherwise there would be no giant stars in the Galaxy. So astronomers would like to know how some stars can seem to defy physics and grow so large. Is this newly discovered stellar embryo destined to grow into a stellar monster? At the moment, nobody knows but further analysis of this Herschel image could give us invaluable clues.

It also reminds me a little bit of the Starchild from 2001: A Space Odyssey…

This entry was posted on May 10, 2010 at 10:12 pm and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags ESA, Herschel, radiation pressure, star formation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.