He was not referring in specific to a structure in space named Circinus West, but the words apply. The object looks, to our eyes, like nothing so much as an eerie crack, a void in space-time in where darkness bleeds through. The cloud, called a dark nebula, is that dense that the hot, bright, baby stars within are hidden from view, nevertheless, it hints of their presence are there, if you know how to appear. Recent pictures from the US Department of Energy’s Dark Energy Camera exemplifies them in stunning detail. Its true nature is truly more marvelous, it’s where light is literally being born, a thick, dark cloud of molecular material in space from which new stars are forming.
Get to know all dark nebula features
The cloud, called a dark nebula, is very much dense that the hot, bright, baby stars within are not visble from view – but hints of their presence are there, if you know how to get to them. Uodated images from the US Department of Energy’s Dark Energy Camera show them in the most detailed way.
Nebulae come in several categories, depending on how they are lit. Reflection nebulae, such as the Pleiades nebula, are those that reflect the light of the stars around them. Emission nebulae are the ones that tend to get the most attention; they are abel to emit their own light in optical wavelengths, created by the ionization of the particles within them, mostly because of the ultraviolet irradiation from stars that are closeby.
Dark nebulae are just what they sound like. They’re very thick and dense, neither emitting nor reflecting light in optical wavelengths, but absorbing and scattering it instead. They will appear like holes in space, anomalous gaps in the sea of stars that makes up the cosmos.
But inside their thick and dusty hearts can be located the perfect conditions for star creation. Baby stars are born from overdensities in already dense, dusty, gassy ecosystems. A knot in the gas will turn into so dense that it collapses under gravity; the spinning, collapsed knot turni into the seed of a baby star, greedily slurping up mass from the abundance of material around it.
“Not all the material slurped by the protostar ens up adding to its mass”
Baby stars are messy eaters, and astronomers estipulates that not all of the material slurped by the protostar ends up adding to its mass. Some of it is instead diverted away from the star, along its external magnetic field lines, and accelerated towards the poles. When it reaches the poles, it is launched away at high speeds as collimated jets.
These jets punch into the surrounding material, their high temperatures transforms it into plasma. This produces two glowing lobes on either side of the protostar, which is still shrouded by a thick cloud of dust and gas. But we can see the jets and the lobes. This short-lived phase of a baby star’s evolution is known as a Herbig-Haro object, and they are pretty odd.
Circinus West’s characteristics
Circinus West, which sits about 2,500 light-years away and measures about 180 light-years across, is home to a number of Herbig-Haro objects, whose glowing lobes peek through the darkness. Other signs of star formation takes into account the cavities carved out by growing stars, which generate powerful protostellar winds in addition to the jets, and gleams of light.
Eventually, the winds and jets will push away the remaining material, cutting off stellar growth, but permitting the light of the star to stream without issues through the Universe. But this current, crucial step of star formation is one that is somewhat mysterious to us, cocooned as it must be in the dark cloud from which the stars are born.
