Hasta La Gadget!

IRAS 20324+4057 is a mouthful, and it’s about 4,500 light years away, but it’s also a star on the move. It’s expanding to form a new star, but it’s unclear how massive that new star will be. "Energetic" wind and light is displacing a lot of the gas and dust that would normally go into the "protostar." Depending on how the play between light and gravity resolves (over the next 100,000 years), the star could expand out and eventually develop into a planetary nebula, or could pull matter in and become a massive star. The protostellar nebula is about one light year across. It was imaged by Hubble in 2006, but the photo above was only released recently. Though it’s unclear what will happen, NASA wants to start making predictions using "clever observations and deductions." We can all play a little stellar guessing game. [Astronomy Picture of the Day]

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Astronomers at the Herschel space observatory have discovered some of the youngest stars ever seen, NASA reports. With observations from the Herschel telescope as well as the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile, researchers were able to detect 15 protostars — the biggest group of such young stars in a single star-forming region. This discovery came during a survey of a stellar formation located in the constellation Orion, with Herschel detecting the bodies in far-infrared-light and the APEX ground telescope verifying the stars’ presence with radio wave observations.

This discovery is especially exciting not just because protostars are especially difficult to detect due to the dense layers of gas and dust that surround them, but also because it indicates that astronomers are getting closer to charting the complete life cycle of a star, starting at the moment of its birth.

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Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory