protostar
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Satellite captures a baby star's 'growth spurt'
It's trivial to see mature stars in action, but baby stars are another matter. They 'only' spend 150,000 years in their earliest formative stage, and they rarely give away clues that they're around. That's what makes the above pictures so important -- scientist Emily Safron and colleagues have become the first to spot a very young protostar's "outburst," or the growth spurt that typically happens when the forming celestial body accumulates a lot of gas and dust relatively quickly. After poring over data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite, the astronomers noticed that a future star that was once virtually invisible, HOPS 383, lit up in the space of just a few years; it got 35 times brighter between 2006 and 2008. You won't see it finish growing up (it's 1,400 light years away, for one thing), but it's likely well on its way toward generating its own energy and officially joining the stellar ranks. [Image credit: E. Safron et al./NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Toledo]
Herschel telescope detects some of the youngest stars ever seen
Astronomers at the Herschel space observatory have discovered some of the youngest stars ever seen, NASA reports. With observations from the Herschel telescope as well as the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile, researchers were able to detect 15 protostars -- the biggest group of such young stars in a single star-forming region. This discovery came during a survey of a stellar formation located in the constellation Orion, with Herschel detecting the bodies in far-infrared-light and the APEX ground telescope verifying the stars' presence with radio wave observations. This discovery is especially exciting not just because protostars are especially difficult to detect due to the dense layers of gas and dust that surround them, but also because it indicates that astronomers are getting closer to charting the complete life cycle of a star, starting at the moment of its birth.
