What Do Newborn Stars Do?

They Destroy Their Birth Crêches

Stars form in great batches at a time, giving rise to groups of stars that are siblings of each other. The first thing these hot young  newborns do is eat away at the cloud of gas and dust that gave them birth. This results in some beautifully sculpted nebulae, such as NGC 3572, which lies in the southern constellation of Carina. Here’s a recent image of this area of space, taken using the Wide Field Imager on the 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s Chilean installation at La Silla.

Hot young stars come out of the nest blowing powerful winds and often sporting bipolar jets. All this action, plus strong ultraviolet radiation, eat away at the more fragile clouds of gas and dust that still surround them. Some parts of the cloud are thicker than others, and the radiation doesn’t quite destroy it all. That’s when we find objects astronomers call “elephant trunks” in the clouds. These are thicker condensations of the birth cloud, and may still contain protostars forming within.

The hot young stars are quite massive, much heavier and denser than the Sun. They typically live very short lives, tens of millions of years or so.  They go through their nuclear very quickly.

By comparison, the Sun–which is a medium-mass star–is consuming its fuel at a more measured rate, and won’t run out for a few billion years yet. The Sun formed some 4.5 billion years ago and will probably be around in one form or another for another 5 billion years before ending its days as a swollen red giant, a planetary  nebula, and then finally, as a slowly cooling white dwarf.

The brightest of the cluster stars of NGC 3572 will blast through their fuel and end their short lives as supernova explosions. As they live their short, energetic lives, these stars will spread out through space, and the once-tight cluster shape will gradually disappear. Ten or so million years from now, these stars will turn this area of space and surrounding regions into a wonderland of expanding clouds leftover from their cataclysmic deaths.

If you click on the picture and enlarge it, you might see a strange little object that looks like a ring nebula. It might be a planetary nebula, but it could also have been formed when a very hot, dense young star blew its winds out and created a bubble in the surrounding gas.  So, for now, astronomers will continue to study this region and follow the activities of these stars and what’s left of their starbirth crêche.