Hubble Sees a Dense Cloud of Gas and Dust That's About to Become a Star - by spacewriter
CB130-3 lies in a filament of the great rift stretching through Aquila and Serpens. In this image, it’s to the right of center in the thick dust clouds that create the rift. Courtesy NASA.So, what happens during star formation, and what role does the dense core play? Star birth is lengthy and these cores are only one part of the process. The first part starts long before cores show up on the scene. First, we need a cloud of gas and dust called a “nebula”. Then, it needs some outside influences.
Inside a dense core, material swirls around and falls into the center. It’s basically piling up gas and dust in a concentrated area. As that happens, pressures and temperatures rise. When enough material gathers, a protostar forms. That happens perhaps a thousand years or more later, depending on the mass of the material. The protostar continues to accrete more gas and dust for another several hundred thousand years.
The whole protostar phase can last for about a half-billion years or so . Eventually, the temperatures and pressures get so high that the core of the protostar ignites nuclear fusion. Again, depending on the final mass of the newborn star, it could take up to ten million years before that happens. But, when that nuclear fusion begins, that’s the moment the star is born. What began as a “seed” inside a dense core of gas and dust is now a full-fledged star.
Objects like this one have interesting chemical properties. They are what’s called a “carbon-chain-rich” dense core. The molecules it contains are particularly useful to trace the chemistry of thick clouds of gas and dust where stars form. Astronomers see them as important tracers of reactive organic materials in star-forming regions.
To study CB130-3, astronomers used HST’s Wide Field Camera 3 to inspect the cloud surrounding the dense core. It varies in thickness, ranging from a diaphanous veil on the outskirts of the object to an almost impervious shroud of gas and dust in the center. Light from stars in the background appears reddened as it passes through the cloud. That color shift helps astronomers understand the density of different parts of the cloud that will unleash new stars into the galaxy.
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