Massive star formation not so different after all? August 2, 2010
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Reconstructed image from near-IR interferometric observations of IRAS 13481-6124 using VLTI/AMBER
In my previous post on the Zooniverse Project IX I’m involved in, I talked about the importance of star formation in the Universe and some of the difficulties we face in studying it. Some big unanswered question particularly remain in our understanding of how massive stars form. Fittingly, the latest edition of Nature has a paper on a nice result in the study of massive star formation: a detection by direct imaging of an accretion disk around a massive young star.
In production: Project IX July 27, 2010
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Star formation loves infrared dark clouds
We all know and love Galaxy Zoo and the various Zooniverse projects that have sprung up in recent months – Solar Stormwatch and Moon Zoo to name a couple. And there’s more on the way. Since the start of the year I’ve been excited about getting involved in another Zooniverse startup, the yet to be named Project IX. Project IX will deal with an area of astronomy I’m particularly interested in, namely star formation.
Blogging holiday July 5, 2010
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Bit of a holiday, back in a few weeks. Meanwhile, enjoy the first all-sky map released from cosmic microwave background satellite Planck!
Dear Fuzzies, Why So Green? May 21, 2010
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Green fuzzies (Cyganowski et al, 2008 & De Buizer & Vacca, 2010)
Amongst all the excitement over the first results from Herschel, it’s easy to forget about its comparatively tiny American cousin Spitzer. Launched in 2003 with its 3 instruments IRAC, IRS and MIPS, Spitzer covers the infrared wavelengths from around 3 to 150 microns – a region that from Earth is either totally inaccessible or severely hampered by atmospheric absorption. With its 85-cm diameter primary mirror, it’s easy to dismiss Spitzer as belonging to a former era. But new science is coming out of Spitzer data every day, and vast quantities of data remain unpublished in the archives. The big legacy surveys in particular, such as c2d (Cores to Disks) and the galactic plane surveys GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL, have released a wealth of data into the public domain, throwing light on old problems and unveiling new mysteries to solve.
One interesting phenomenon witnessed on the images from the GLIMPSE survey was a curious population on extended green objects (EGOs). Catalogued by Cyganowski et al in 2008, these “green fuzzies” appear to be associated with regions of massive star formation – many of them lie in or very near to infrared dark clouds, known to harbour the earliest forms of massive star birth, or are associated with methanol masers, strong radio emission caused by excitation of methanol molecules by infrared radiation from dust. Their green colour is in a sense incidental, arising from the way we construct 3-colour images from the Spitzer camera IRAC. IRAC takes images in 4 channels, at 3.6, 4.5, 5.8 and 8 microns, and typically an red-green-blue image uses the 8, 4.5 and 3.6 micron data, respectively. In this picture, “green” indicates that the object has an unusually high flux in the 4.5 micron band.
Herschel looks into the Heart of Darkness May 10, 2010
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Star formation in Gould's Belt
Last week a big conference took place at the European Space Agency hub ESTEC, down the road in Noordwijk. The town was inundated with the lucky scientists who got to play with the first data from the new infrared space observatory Herschel and were finally allowed to talk about it to the rest of the world. And now that the conference is over, as expected, science from Herschel is everywhere!
