stellar birth

Finding bubbles in the Milky Way

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Photo: Stellar bubbles detected by people! Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Oxford University
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Oxford University

A team of volunteers from the general public has pored over observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and discovered more than 5,000 “bubbles” in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy. Young, hot stars blow the bubbles into surrounding gas and dust, highlighting areas of brand new star formation.

Upwards of 35,000 “citizen scientists” sifted through the Spitzer infrared data as part of the online Milky Way Project to find these telltale bubbles. The users have turned up 10 times as many bubbles as previous surveys so far.

Computer programs struggle at identifying the cosmic bubbles. But human eyes and minds do an excellent job of noticing the wispy arcs of partially broken rings and the circles-within-circles of overlapping bubbles. The Milky Way Project taps into the “wisdom of crowds” by requiring that at least five users flag a potential bubble before its inclusion in the new catalog. Volunteers mark any candidate bubbles in the infrared Spitzer images with a sophisticated drawing tool before proceeding to scour another image.

“The Milky Way Project is an attempt to take the vast and beautiful data from Spitzer and make extracting the information a fun, online, public endeavor,” said Robert Simpson, a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at Oxford University, England, principal investigator of the Milky Way Project and lead author of the paper.

The data come from the Spitzer Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) and Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer Galactic (MIPSGAL) surveys. These datasets cover a narrow, wide strip of the sky measuring 130 degrees wide and just two degrees tall. From a stargazer’s perspective, a two-degree strip is about the width of your index finger held at arm’s length, and your arms opened to the sky span about 130 degrees. The surveys peer through the Milky Way’s disk and right into the galaxy’s heart.

Volunteers for the project are shown a small section of Spitzer’s huge infrared Milky Way image (left), which they then scan for cosmic bubbles. Using a sophisticated drawing tool, the volunteers trace the shape and thickness of the bubbles.

All the user drawings can be overlaid on top of one another to form a so-called “heat map” (middle). Features that have been identified repeatedly by many different users jump out, revealing the overall pattern of bubbles in this part of the galaxy.

At least five volunteers must flag a candidate bubble before it is included in the final catalog (right). The brightness of each bubble in the catalog is determined by its “hit rate,” or the fraction of users who traced it out. The faintest ones were identified by 10 percent of the users, while solid white indicates a hit rate of 50 percent or better.

After identifying all apparent bubbles, which can include wispy arcs of partially broken rings and the circles-within-circles of overlapping bubbles, volunteers get another of the 12,263 possible image sections to scrutinize. With so much sky to cover, it is clear why so many volunteers are needed to do this kind of science.



Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Oxford University

Star clears away birth clouds

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Photo: Hubble Space Telescope image of star-forming region Sh 2-106, or S106 for short.
Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

The Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera-3 has captured this image of a giant cloud of hydrogen gas illuminated by a bright young star. The image shows how violent the end stages of the star-formation process can be, with the young object shaking up its stellar nursery. Click here for a much larger image!

Despite the celestial colors of this picture, there is nothing peaceful about star forming region Sh 2-106, or S106 for short. A devilish young star, named S106 IR, lies in it and ejects material at high speed, which disrupts the gas and dust around it. The star has a mass about 15 times that of the Sun and is in the final stages of its formation. It will soon quieten down by entering the main sequence, the adult stage of stellar life.

For now, S106 IR remains embedded in its parent cloud, but it is rebelling against it. The material spewing off the star not only gives the cloud its hourglass shape but also makes the hydrogen gas in it very hot and turbulent. The resulting intricate patterns are clearly visible in this Hubble image.

The young star also heats up the surrounding gas, making it reach temperatures of 10 000 degrees Celsius. The star’s radiation ionizes the hydrogen lobes, making them glow. The light from this glowing gas is colored blue in this image.

Separating these regions of glowing gas is a cooler, thick lane of dust, appearing red in the image. This dark material almost completely hides the ionizing star from view, but the young object can still be seen peeking through the widest part of the dust lane.

S106 was the 106th object to be cataloged by the astronomer Stewart Sharpless in the 1950s. It is a few thousand light-years distant in the direction of Cygnus (The Swan). The cloud itself is relatively small by the standards of star-forming regions, around 2 light-years along its longest axis. This is about half the distance between the Sun and Proxima Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor.

This composite picture was obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It results from the combination of two images taken in infrared light and one which is tuned to a specific wavelength of visible light emitted by excited hydrogen gas, known as H-alpha. This choice of wavelengths is ideal for targeting star-forming regions. The H-alpha filter isolates the light emitted from hydrogen in gas clouds while the infrared light can shine through the dust that often obscures these regions.