A high-powered telescope array has caught the brilliant fireworks-like "streamers" of gas formed during an early stage of star development in a giant cluster.
That process may take a million years to complete, according to scientists who captured a new look at the star cluster formally known as G286.21+0.17. To image the star cluster in all its glory, the astronomers used two different instruments: the Hubble Space Telescope, which provided a look at the existing stars in the cluster, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, which provided a look at the gas falling inward to form future stars.
"This illustrates how dynamic and chaotic the process of star birth is," co-author Jonathan Tan of Chalmers University in Sweden and the University of Virginia, said in a statement. "We see competing forces in action: gravity and turbulence from the cloud on one side, and stellar winds and radiation pressure from the young stars on the other."