Stellar Factory

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

Stand­ing and fly­ing birds hide in a jun­gle of eyes in a star-making fac­tory known as Cygnus X in this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Tele­scope.

Zoom into the intri­cate bub­bles, folds and lay­ers of dust in this infrared image. Let us know in the com­ments below what you see; what pat­terns you find or what sto­ries you create.

Cygnus X is a vast star nurs­ery. This part of our Milky Way Galaxy is the most active and chaotic regions of star birth. Cav­i­ties, or bub­bles, carved out by vicious radi­a­tion and winds from the most mas­sive stars in the cloud, dom­i­nate the scene. These huge stars will likely have short lives and end blow­ing them­selves apart in super­nova explo­sions. As gas and dust are pushed out­ward from these explo­sions, new stars will form where the mate­r­ial is pushed together. As these shock­waves move out­ward more new stars will form.

Spitzer allows astronomers a chance to peer into the thick dust of this neb­ula. On Earth, we feel infrared light as heat on our skin. Vis­i­ble light is blocked by the dark dust but infrared light is not. As we look into this cloud, new bright stars appear. Some are smaller than our Sun. Oth­ers are among the largest in the galaxy. We see young stars grow­ing in pil­lars of gas. New stars are also seen tucked into cocoons of dust lin­ing the edges of the bub­bles. Astronomers think that our Sun was cre­ated in a smaller and less chaotic ver­sion of this star cloud.

Cygnus X is found about 4,500 light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Cygnus, the Swan.

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