The surprise discovery of a huge cloud of molecular gas — the stuff that forms stars — just 300 light-years away is opening up new ways to study the conditions that enable star birth.
Stars form from collapsing clouds of molecular gas. We see this in the likes of the Orion Nebula, which gets energized by hot ultraviolet radiation of the young stars born within. However, finding molecular clouds before they begin producing stars is more difficult.
Such clouds are predominantly made from molecular hydrogen gas, which, when it isn’t being energized by starlight, is very faint — almost invisible. (Atomic hydrogen, on the other hand, is easily detectable by radio telescopes). Astronomers usually use radio telescopes to detect carbon monoxide, which is available in much lower quantities in molecular clouds, as a proxy.
Wonder how it’s both “hidden” and “literally glowing” at the same time…
From the Article:
Astronomers led by Blakesley Burkhart of Rutgers University–New Brunswick in New Jersey and Thavisha Dharmawardena of New York University, have pioneered an entirely new way of seeing the invisible. Using far-ultraviolet data from the Korean STSAT-1 satellite, they directly detected molecules of hydrogen fluorescing.
So it was always glowing, we just couldn’t actually see it until recently.
