The visible light image is a wide-angle view of an active star forming region of our galaxy. This large complex of gas clouds can be seen from the Southern Hemisphere, but it is not as famous as its cousin, the Orion Nebula.
Over a year ago, astronomers using the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment, or APEX, studied the parts of the nebula that are not visible to our eyes or to optical telescopes.
The orange "blobs" in this image represent the regions that glow as seen by a sub-millimeter telescope such as APEX. Most of this emission comes from dust which is warmed up by ultraviolet and visible light from the young stars that then radiates at longer wavelengths. Many of the young stars are extremely large, hot, and will not live for much longer in cosmic timescales.
However, not all of the gas in the nebula will actually form stars. Only about 10 percent of this gas is dense enough to start the star birth process, and this is pretty typical for our galaxy.
A small fraction of interstellar gas in the Milky Way is creating new stars at any given time while the rest is just... there. That may be a little stellar-centric of me to say, but as a living being on a planet, I am prejudiced towards environments that make planets.
The stuff of life itself may be in these clouds. Astronomers estimate that the cloud is 200,000 times the mass of our sun, and most of the material is in a molecular state. That means that the atoms are combining in ways similar to the chemistry that governs life on Earth. It's almost sad to think of all that raw material that orbits in our galaxy, perhaps never to be used to build a new star or planets.
Read more at Discovery News
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