Grand galactic views
Posted: Thursday, June 11, 2009 9:00 AM by Alan Boyle
S.V. Ramirez / NExSci / Caltech / JPL / NASA |
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This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the center of the
Milky Way galaxy, with three baby stars highlighted in the inset images.
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has turned up infrared evidence of baby stars being born near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The discovery demonstrates that our home galaxy's most crowded neighborhood is more diverse than astronomers may have thought.
"These stars are like needles in a haystack," Solange Ramirez, principal investigator of the research program at NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology, said in a news release issued Wednesday. "There's no way to find them using optical light, because dust gets in the way. We needed Spitzer's infrared instruments to cut through the dust and narrow in on the objects."
In its current condition, the Milky Way's center isn't the kind of place you'd think infant stars would find much footing. Until now, astronomers haven't had much luck finding young stellar objects. But the Spitzer science team focused in on about 100 candidates and identified three stars that were less than a million years old, based on their spectral signatures in infrared wavelengths.
"It is amazing to me that we have found these stars," Ramirez said. "The galactic center is a very interesting place. It has young stars, old stars, black holes, everything. We started mining a catalog of about 1 million sources and managed to find three young stars - stars that will help reveal the secrets at the core of the Milky Way."
And not just the Milky Way, according to Deokkeun An of Caltech's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, who is the lead author of a research paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. "By studying individual stars in the galactic center, we can better understand how stars are formed in different interstellar environments," An said in Wednesday's news release.
The Spitzer imagery was unveiled during this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, Calif. Here are other tales of galactic goings-on from the AAS agenda:
