Hubble spots three young stars going through growth spurts
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a trio of young stars becoming their best selves in the constellation Scorpius. Published on the agency’s website on January 16 as part of its Hubble Stellar Construction Zones series, the three T Tauri stars – seen at lower right, upper center and left with many other stellar objects in the background – are forming inside the hazy cloud of Lupus 3 about 500 light-years from Earth. Although the image appears somewhat serene, the inner forces at play are anything but calm.
The AT Tauri star is a young star, generally less than 10 million years old. During this phase, the growing stellar object sees the dust and gas around it begin to disappear as stellar winds, radiation, and other ionized particles bombard it. This dynamic environment is reflected in the star’s brightness, which fluctuates randomly depending on ongoing material interactions in its accretion disk. More regular brightness changes can also occur as sunspots move in and out of astronomers’ view here on Earth.
The examples of T Tauri seen in the Hubble image still have a long way to go before they resemble the stars most observers recognize. Gravity will continue to pull down on the object until it forces the elements hydrogen and helium to fuse in the star’s core, at which point it will eventually become a main-sequence stellar object.
The stars of Scorpius are, however, more advanced in their growth than the protostars highlighted by NASA on January 14. About 1,300 light years away, Orion’s “sword” protostars are making their debut inside the constellation’s Orion Molecular Cloud complex. Astronomers pointed Hubble at this area of ​​the sky to better understand outflow cavities, areas where a protostar’s gas and dust are swept away by nearby stellar winds.
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