Baby Blanket

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA)

New­born stars are tucked away in their baby blan­ket of gas and dust in this image of Rho Ophi­uchus from NASA’s Spitzer Space Tele­scope.

Zoom into the folds of mol­e­c­u­lar hydro­gen gas glow­ing red in this image. Explore the bubble-like neb­u­lae sur­round­ing some of the stars. What shapes and sto­ries do you see in this neb­ula? Leave a note below.

Rho Ophichus, or Rho Oph as it’s known by astronomers, is home to some very young stars. Researchers of have found more than 300 young objects within the cen­tral cloud with ages of only about 300,000 years. Their great-granddaddies, the old­est stars in the uni­verse, are more than 12 bil­lion years old. Even our Sun, with an age of more than 4 bil­lion years is a grown-up to these young objects.

Spitzer sees the uni­verse in infrared light. With the aid of the tele­scope, sci­en­tists can peer deep into cold clouds of star dust and see warm objects that might be the begin­nings of stars. The col­ors of this infrared image rep­re­sent tem­per­a­tures within the star cloud. The col­ors also reveal aspects of the neb­ula sur­round­ing the stars. The youngest stars sur­rounded by their dusty shrouds are tinged with yellow-green. Older stars in the neb­ula have already blown away their blan­kets of dust and show more blue-white.

Rho Oph is only 407 light-years from Earth mak­ing it one of the clos­est star-making regions. It lies toward the con­stel­la­tions Scor­pius, the scor­pion, and Ophi­uchus, the snake charmer.