A powerful telescope has captured the rainbow-colored remains of an ancient star birth.
Astronomers in northern Chile gathered images of an explosive beginning in the Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1), an active star factory that lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth, just behind the Orion Nebula.
This story began around 100,000 years ago, when two adolescent protostars (very young stars) grew increasingly angsty about being stuck in their stellar nursery.
The siblings latched onto each other gravitationally and gradually drew closer, until eventually, they either grazed each other or collided, astronomers said in a paper published last week in the Astrophysical Journal. Read more...
More about Protostar, Orion, Orion Nebula, Astronomers, and Astronomyvia Zero Tech Blog
