Bird in the hair

Credit: ESO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Kraus

A winged bird alights in the hair of a face in this neb­ula cap­tured by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Explore this region of gas and dust. Share sto­ries of what you see below.

A huge star, IRAS 13481–6124, formed from this neb­ula. The star, sur­rounded by the gas and dust that helped it form, is about 20 times more mas­sive than our sun and five times big­ger around. This offers sci­en­tists their first look at the birth of a mas­sive star. Spitzer shows astronomers areas of warm gas and dust. They can peer through this dust and get a detailed look at the dusty disk that sur­rounds stars after they are born. And con­sis­tent with other obser­va­tions of stars form­ing, the image shows that mas­sive stars form in sim­i­lar ways to smaller and cooler stars. Disks of gas and dust around young stars, includ­ing mas­sive stars, is strong evi­dence for the pos­si­bil­ity of plan­ets, per­haps even Earth-like ones. Mas­sive stars like IRAS 13481–6124 pro­vide the build­ing blocks for life in the uni­verse. Heav­ier ele­ments, such as gold and sil­ver, form after mas­sive stars burn through all of their hydro­gen fuel and explode in supernovae.

IRAS 13481–6124 is found about 10,000 light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Cen­tau­rus.