Stellar Nursery Gives Birth To Shiny New Cosmos Beauties.

 

Enlarge. | Via.

Check out this gorgeous Cosmic Baby Building Factory. Like wut! Like woah. The nebula  Sharpless 2-239 is home to some baby star production, and it all seems more kosher than the wet sounds and strained muscles we conjure up during our reproduction.

Bad Astronomy:

Isn’t that breathtaking? This image shows a portion of a much larger complex which currently has over a dozen stars forming inside it. Several of the stars you see here are quite young, only a few million years old. Since these are low mass stars like the Sun, and will merrily fuse hydrogen into helium for billions of years, this is like seeing a human baby when it’s less than a month old.

And, like babies will, these stars eject material from both ends: called  bipolar outflow, twin beams of material (typically called “jets”) are screaming out of these newborns at several hundred kilometers per second in opposite directions. These jets slam into the dense surrounding material, compressing it, heating it up, and causing it to glow. The structure you see fanning out to the lower left is from one of these jets, the one headed more or less toward us. The one moving in the other direction is mostly hidden from our view by the thick dust in the region.

But there’s much much more going on here…

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Pretty little things, bent on fusion for billions of years.