Sharpless 2-106 - A cauldron of star formation
Channel: Launch Pad Astronomy
Date: 28/11/2011

2,000 light years away, in the constellation of Cygnus the Swan, lies a cauldron of star formation. This nebula, known as Sharpless 2-106 is home to recently born and still-forming new stars.

A newborn star some 15 times the mass of our sun lurks at the center of a thick disk of dust and gas. This stellar behemoth was born just some 100,000 years ago, and floods its surrounding nebula with ultraviolet radiation, causing it to glow. The star is generating winds of 200 km/sec, or over 447,000 mph. The winds are channeled by the disk into giant bipolar lobes, stretching nearly a light year in either direction.

So thick are the clouds and dust that the stars forming within cannot be directly seen. But infrared observations allow us to peer through some of the gas and dust, and detect the heat signatures of up to 150 smaller stars forming in cocoons in the nebula. 

These cocoons are several times larger than our entire solar system, and contain a hot dense embryonic star forming at their centers.

Eventually, the giant star at the center of the nebula will erode away the surrounding gas, and break free from its stellar chrysalis. A cluster of 50 to 150 stars will be left in the remains of the surrounding nebula. 

10-15 million years from now, the giant star will end its short life in a supernova explosion, perhaps creating similar hourglass shape in the process. 

In a beautiful symmetry of nature, dying stars can create structures at the ends of their lives that resemble the very nebulae in which they formed.

Each generation of stars are born of the ashes of their ancestors, forging elements such as Carbon, Oxygen, Copper, and Iron and so on into the makeup of the next generation of stars. Some of the leftover material condense to form planets, and on some of those planets, an even smaller amount of material condenses to form life.

CANARIAS http://www.gtc.iac.es/en/pages/multimedia.php

GEMENI / SUBARU: http://www.gemini.edu/node/11410

HST: http://spacetelescope.org/

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