Using Nasa’s Spitzer space telescope, astronomers have found a bizarre super-dense dust cloud some 16,000 light years away. It is huge: about 50 light years in diameter. And in that space is packed mass equivalent to 7,000 Suns. The shadows cast by this dense cloud have been described by stunned scientists as “blackest of black” and Nasa is calling them “the deepest shadows ever recorded”.
The dusty cloud, results suggest, will likely evolve into one of the most massive young clusters of stars in our galaxy. The densest clumps will blossom into the cluster’s biggest, most powerful stars, called O-type stars, the formation of which has long puzzled scientists. These hulking stars have major impacts on their local stellar environments while also helping to create the heavy elements needed for life.
“The map of the structure of the cloud and its dense cores we have made in this study reveals a lot of fine details about the massive star and star cluster formation process,” said Michael Butler, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and lead author of the study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Most stars in the universe are thought to have formed en masse in these sorts of environments. Clusters of low-mass stars are quite common and well-studied. But clusters giving birth to higher-mass stars, like the cluster described here, are scarce and distant, which makes them harder to examine.
