December 26, 2003
Every birthday is a reminder that you are made of the same material as the stars overhead — carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all cooked in stellar...
Young Star, Dark Cloud
Birthday · December 26, 2003
A little universe, just for you
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APOD published December 26, 2003. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
High-speed outflows of molecular gas from a young stellar object glow in infrared light, revealing themselves in this recent false-color image from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Cataloged as HH (Herbig-Haro) 46/47 the infrared source is lodged within a dark nebula or Bok globule - near the lower right corner of the dark nebula in the optical inset - that is largely opaque when viewed in visible light. The energetic outflow features extend for nearly a light-year, burrowing into the dark interstellar material, and are attributed to early stages in the life of a sun-like star. They may well represent a phase of our own Sun's evolution which took place some 4.5 billion years ago, along with the formation of our solar system from a circumstellar disk. A tantalizing object to explore with Spitzer's infrared capabilities, this young star system is relatively nearby, located only some 1,140 light-years distant in the nautical constellation Vela.