In February 2011 the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 captured the extraordinary show of a star that is still forming illuminating the surrounding cloud of hydrogen and now NASA and ESA have published some stunning images of it.
This star is part of a nebula known as Sharpless 2-106 (Sh2-106, or abbreviated as S106) because it’s one of those cataloged by astronomer Stewart Sharpless in the ’50s. In this nebula about two thousand light years away from Earth, a very young star is causing a furious activity.
The denomination of this star is S106 IR according to ESA and IR4 according to NASA: IR is used because it was seen for the first time in infrared images. This star has a mass about fifteen times the Sun and is still in the earliest phase of its life because it hasn’t yet entered the main sequence, the phase of life when the stars are fully formed.
S106 IR is still surrounded by the cloud in which it formed and for this reason it’s heating the gas around it, which can reach temperatures up to ten thousand degrees Celsius. At this stage of its formation, the star is emitting gas at high speeds making its neighbourhood chaotic and giving the cloud an hourglass shape. This is common due to rapid rotation of S106 IR.
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The radiation emitted by S106 IR contribute to ionize the hydrogen that forms the cloud making it glow. The photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope were worked on using the color blue to obtain the fantastic images released by NASA and ESA.
The light emanating from S106 IR reflects off small dust particles forming the red areas of the images. The star itself is almost completely obscured by dust.
The two “lobes” at the sides of S106 IR aren’t symmetrical. This is probably due to other cooler and darker material in the vicinity, a possibility confirmed by the fact that detailed studies of the nebula have revealed the presence of hundreds of brown dwarfs. This is an area where there’s a lot of gas that allows the formation of objects that may have a mass from one-tenth of the Sun to blue giants.
Soon in astronomical terms, which means in a few hundred thousand years, S106 IR will stabilize but a blue giant of that mass has a relatively short life ending in a supernova. This star, however, has already offered us an extraordinary show!
