30 years ago hubble telescope has been unraveling the secrets of the cosmos, but Spitzer astronomical observatory He also navigates sending curious photos every day. Between them, at some point they found the star-forming nebula W51, one of the largest star factories in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Some nebulae are spirals; other mills with blades. There are even those that look like tangled octopuses and others that remind us of Vincent Van Gogh with nostalgia.
Star formation is one of the most important engineering processes in the universe. Understanding it helps us to understand the evolution of galaxies. However, there are still many questions that astronomers cannot answer. For example, how the composition of stellar boundaries varies according to your gas map.
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There is even a point where the interpretation of everything that comes to us from heaven leaves us speechless and becomes contaminated with pre-Socratic philosophy: What is the force that drives a star to be born?
To answer these questions, the great pollsters of the universe put all their chips to W 51. Hard, cryptic without a doubt, if one takes into account that already in 1958 they spotted W51 in the galactic night, 17 thousand light years from Earth. A dense veil of clouds formed by interstellar dust separates us from it, but the telescopes have it surrounded and with infrared rays they are submerging in its privacy.
To the naked eye, nebula W51 looks like a cavern of dust and gas where thousands of stars of various sizes were formed, a dramatic landscape in which these beings of light live that paradoxically never saw visible light. In that dense interior, the stars are surrounded by mountains and valleys of gases in a space so vast that the distances between them are measured in light years.
“W51 offers a spectacular sight: its total emission of infrared rays is the equivalent of 20 million Suns,” enthuses Calla Cofield, from NASA’s Propulsion Laboratory.
“The Orion nebula – another star-forming regionA favorite observation point for amateur astronomers – it occupies almost the same area in the sky. However, W51 is actually much further from Earth than Orion, it is much larger and emits 75 times more light than Orion. While the latter contains four stars called type-O -the most massive in the universe- W51 contains about 30”, Accredits the expert from her laboratory in Pasadena.
“You can tell that the right sector of W51 is older by the way the nebula’s dust and gas are carved, all the more so if the stars it houses died or they exploded like supernovae. The left side of W51 is younger, with stars that are being born. Apparently some of these young stars are in the process of forming empty space bubbles around of them ”, he explains almost enigmatically.
To this stellar orography, let’s add a center with very powerful X-ray emissions, an energy so overwhelming that it is only conceivable if you think about the interaction of two young stars. “This intense, massive radiation must change the chemistry of the molecules that surround the star system, present a hostile environment for planet formation”Cofield makes us think.
In the intergalactic world there will also be the survival of the fittest?
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