Tears in the sky | ESO Chile

Is it a comet? Is it a spaceship? The subject of this picture of the week may be a little difficult to recognize at first. It is indeed a young star, but why does it have such an unusual shape?

Young stars are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust – the materials from which planets are built. When other very bright and massive stars are nearby, their light heats the disk of the young star, stripping it of some of its material. The teardrop-shaped object in this image, 177-341 W, is in the Orion Nebula. The stars eroding the 177-341 W disk are out of the image, beyond the upper right corner. When its radiation collides with the material surrounding the young star, it creates the bright arc-shaped structure seen in yellow. The tail extending from the star toward the lower left corner is material that is being dragged away from 177-341 W by stars outside the field of view. In English, these types of objects (ionized protoplanetary disks) are known as “proplyds.”

This observation is presented in a new scientific paper led by Mari-Liis Aru (ESO) and carried out with the MUSE instrument, installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. The colors shown in this image map different elements such as hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen. But it’s just a small fraction of all the data collected by MUSE, which actually takes thousands of images in different colors or wavelengths simultaneously. This allows the astronomical community to study the physical properties of protoplanetary disks in great detail, including the amount of mass they lose. This new paper presents UXO observations from many others proplyds in Orion, part of a project led by Carlo F. Manara (ESO) that will help understand how stars and planetary systems form in these stellar nurseries.