BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Starbirth *new article*

People once thought that stars were eternal and unchanging. Today we now that they have life cycles of birth and death. Here is the story of how a star like our Sun is born.

Starbirth

Here is a lovely picture of the star-forming nebula NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. NGC 346

This image of a nebula in the constellation Aquila (the Eagle) shows that young stars are lighting up parts of the cloud. The protostars are tucked away in dark filaments.

In visible light all you would see is a dark nebula. But this picture is from the Herschel Space Observatory which observed in the infrared. The Hubble Space Telescope made some beautiful pictures of stellar nurseries, but it's only through the development of infrared telescopes and radio telescopes that people could really study them closely.