Astronomers Uncover New Insights into Star Formation with the VISTA Telescope

Wednesday - May 24 2023, 01:49 UTC - 1 year ago

Using the VISTA telescope, astronomers have created an extensive infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by combining over one million images. This atlas provides insights into the complex process of star formation and reveals previously unseen objects. With this survey, astronomers hope to gain a better understanding of the complex processes of star formation.

Astronomers have used VISTA to create an infrared atlas of five stellar nurseries, offering unprecedented insights into star formation and revealing previously unseen objects. The VISIONS atlas will serve as a valuable resource for years and lay the foundation for future observations.

Using the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), astronomers have created an extensive infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by combining over one million images. This atlas provides insights into the complex process of star formation and reveals previously unseen objects. The VISIONS survey captured images of star-forming regions in various constellations and observed the same areas repeatedly to study the motion of young stars. The VISIONS atlas will be valuable for astronomers for years to come and will set the groundwork for future observations with other telescopes, such as ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).

Using ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), astronomers have created a vast infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by piecing together more than one million images. These large mosaics reveal young stars in the making, embedded in thick clouds of dust. Thanks to these observations, astronomers have a unique tool with which to decipher the complex puzzle of stellar birth.

"In these images we can detect even the faintest sources of light, like stars far less massive than the Sun, revealing objects that no one has ever seen before," says Stefan Meingast, an astronomer at the University of Vienna in Austria and lead author of the new study published on May 11 in Astronomy & Astrophysics. "This will allow us to understand the processes that transform gas and dust into stars." .

Stars form when clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity, but the details of how this happens are not fully understood. How many stars are born out of a cloud? How massive are they? How many stars will also have planets? .

To answer these questions, Meingast’s team surveyed five nearby star-forming regions with the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Using VISTA’s infrared camera VIRCAM, the team captured light coming from deep inside the clouds of dust. "The dust obscures these young stars from our view, making them virtually invisible to our eyes. Only at infrared wavelengths can we look deep into these clouds, studying the stars in the making," explains Alena Rottensteiner, a PhD student also at the University of Vienna and co-author of the study.

The survey, called VISIONS, observed star-forming regions in the constellations of Orion, Ophiuchus, Chamaeleon, Corona Australis, and Lupus. These regions are less than 1500 light-years away and so large that they span a huge area in the sky. The diameter of VIRCAM’s field of view is as wide as three full Moons, which makes it uniquely suited to map these immensely big regions.

The team obtained more than one million images over a period of five years. The individual images were then pieced together into the large mosaics released here, revealing vast cosmic landscapes. These detailed panoramas feautre a remarkable variety of shapes, from intricate filaments to latticed shells, with mysterious dark stipples that hide the youngest stars.