Astronomy News
Gas Globs in the Hot Seat New Hubble observations of distant gaseous globs highlight the creative and destructive power of star formation. by W. B. Schomaker Though star formation is generally viewed as a constructive process, new clues from deep within the constellation Centaurus are giving astronomers a glimpse of the destructive power that infant stars hold over their unborn neighbors. The magnificent star-forming nebula IC 2944 lies just 5,900 light-years from Earth. A newly-released Hubble Space Telescope image of a small region near the heart of IC 2944, amid the nebula's youngest and brightest hot (O-type) stars, displays a close-up view of several curious dark blobs called Thackeray?s Globules. Named after A. D. Thackeray who discovered them in 1950, the globules appear dark because they are dense enough to completely block starlight from behind. This new high-resolution Hubble image is particularly useful to astronomers because it allows them to study fine details of the globules for the first time. Since studying the images, University of Hawaii astronomer Bo Reipurth and his collaborators have learned that the globules are slowly being torn apart by incessant ultraviolet radiation from neighboring young stars. Over time, the dense, dark gas in these globules, which might have produced as many as fifteen stars like the sun if it had remained shielded from the ultraviolet sandblasting of nearby stars, will eventually heat up and dissipate into the surrounding nebula.
