A beautiful birth of a star has created an ethereal structure.
A new image from the International Gemini Observatory in Chile shows a pale gossamer butterfly wing in the sky, which is 520 light-years away.
Dust obscures the turbulent processes at play as the star comes together.
Stars and their births are both intense objects. They form when dense clumps of gas collapse under their own weight.
As they spin, material is drawn into an accretion disk that feeds into a growing star.
The protostar starts to produce a powerful stellar wind as it grows, and material falling into it starts to interact with its magnetic fields. The material is blasted into space by powerful jets of magnetic field lines.
Astronomers think we are looking at the ChamaeleonInfrared Nebula, which glows brightly in theIR, because of this image.
The 'wing' is a tunnel carved out of the cloud of gas around the star.
The Chamaeleon is a star. The International Gemini Observatory is part of the NOIRLab.
The light from the baby star illuminates the space and creates a reflection nebula.
The star is obscured by a dark band at the narrowest point.
The accretion disk is viewed edge-on. A blob of material ejected from the star slammed into the surrounding gas, which is what we can see from the right.
The process creates bright patches of nebulosity called Herbig-Haro objects. This one is known as HH 909A. Astronomers can observe Herbig-Haro objects change in a few years.
The winds and jets from the star have another effect. They blow away material from around the star, cutting off its gas supply and allowing it to grow further.
By that time, the star should have gained enough mass to generate enough pressure and heat and its core to ignite nuclear fusion, kicking it onto the main sequence as a full star.
You can download the full version of the image on the NOIRLab website.
