Poster Version
Newborn stars peek out from beneath their natal blanket of dust in this
dynamic image of the Rho Ophiuchi dark cloud from NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope. Called "Rho Oph" by astronomers, it's one of the closest
star-forming regions to our own solar system. Located near the
constellations Scorpius and Ophiuchus, the nebula is about 407 light years
away from Earth.
Rho Oph is a complex made up of a large main cloud of molecular hydrogen,
a key molecule allowing new stars to form from cold cosmic gas, with two
long streamers trailing off in different directions. Recent studies using
the latest X-ray and infrared observations reveal more than 300 young
stellar objects within the large central cloud. Their median age is only
300,000 years, very young compared to some of the universe's oldest stars,
which are more than 12 billion years old.
This false-color image of Rho Oph's main cloud, Lynds 1688, was created
with data from Spitzer's infrared array camera, which has the highest
spatial resolution of Spitzer's three imaging instruments. Blue
represents 3.6 micron light, green is 4.5 micron light, orange is 5.8, and
red is 8.0. The multiple wavelengths reveal different aspects of the dust
surrounding and between the embedded stars, yielding information about the
stars and their birthplace.
The colors in this image reflect the relative temperatures and
evolutionary states of the various stars. The youngest stars are
surrounded by dusty disks of gas from which they, and their potential
planetary systems, are forming. These young disk systems show up as
yellow-green tinted stars in this image. Some of these young stellar
objects are surrounded by their own compact nebulae. More evolved stars,
which have shed their natal material, are blue-white.
The extended white nebula in the center right of the image is a region of
the cloud which is glowing in infrared light due to the illumination of
dust by bright young stars near the right edge of the cloud. Red and pink
diffuse emission from carbon-rich dust molecules fills the image. Most of
the stars forming now are concentrated in a filament of cold, dense gas
that shows up as a dark cloud in the lower center and left side of the
image against the bright background of the warm dust. Although infrared
radiation at 8 microns pierces through dust easily, this dark filament is
incredibly opaque, appearing dark even at the longest wavelengths in the
image.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer
Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate,
Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center
at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech
manages JPL for NASA.
Spitzer's infrared array camera was built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center, Greenbelt, Md. The instrument's principal investigator is Giovanni
Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
For more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and
http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer.