Space telescope captures birth of stars
Wednesday, June 1, 2005 Posted: 10:02 AM EDT (1402 GMT)
The infrared telescope "busted open" this murky cloud to reveal star embryos (yellow or white) tucked inside finger-like pillars of thick dust (pink).
LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- The infrared eyes of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have captured the birth of as many as 100,000 stars in a massive gas cloud surrounding a star about 10,000 light years from Earth, NASA said Tuesday.
The image returned by Spitzer's infrared array camera shows the Carina nebula, where scientists believe radiation and winds emanating from a cluster of massive stars ripped apart the nebula's clouds of gas and dust and compressed them to form new stars.
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