Astronomers spot ghostly ‘one-winged butterfly’ blazing in space

The beautiful birth of a star has produced a delightfully ethereal structure in interstellar space.

It’s called the Chamaeleon infrared nebula, located about 520 light years away, and in a new image from the NSF NOIRLab International Gemini Observatory in Chile, it appears in the sky as a pale, wispy butterfly wing.

At its heart, however, obscured by dust, lie the turbulent processes at play when the star comes together.

Stars are intense objects, just like their births. They form when dense clusters in clouds of molecular gas collapse and spin under their own gravity.

As they spin, matter is drawn into an accretion disk that powers the growing protostar – the mass of gas that will become the star.

As the protostar grows, it begins to produce a strong stellar wind, and matter falling into the protostar begins to interact with its magnetic fields. This material flows along magnetic field lines to the poles, where it is projected into space in the form of powerful jets of plasma.

This is what astronomers think we are looking at with the Chameleon Infrared Nebula (so named because it glows brightly in the infrared, although this image is in optical wavelengths).

The “wing” is a tunnel dug in the gas cloud around the star by one of the protostar jets.

The chameleon infrared nebula. (International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA)

Light from the little star then illuminates this cavity from within, reflecting off the gaseous structures to create what we call a reflection nebula.

The star itself is obscured by a vertical dark stripe, visible at the narrowest point.

This, according to our understanding, is the accretion disk of the protostar, viewed from the side. A red drop to the right of this disc from our perspective is a point at which a drop of matter ejected from the star has struck the surrounding gas.

This process creates bright, short-lived areas of cloudiness called Herbig-Haro objects. This is known as HH 909A. Astronomers who observe closely can observe the change in Herbig-Haro objects on a time scale of only a few years.

These winds and jets of the star also have another effect. They blow matter around the protostar, ultimately cutting off its gas supply and therefore its ability to grow further.

By this point, the star should have gained enough mass to generate enough pressure and heat and its core to ignite nuclear fusion, projecting it onto the main sequence as a full star.

You can download full size and wallpaper versions of this image from the NOIRLab website.

About Johnnie Gross

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