New View of Family Life in the North American Nebula

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Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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Image advisory: 2011-047 Feb. 10, 2011

New View of Family Life in the North American Nebula

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-047&cid=release_2011-047

PASADENA, Calif. -- Stars at all stages of development, from dusty little tots to young adults, are
on display in a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

This cosmic community is called the North American nebula. In visible light, the region resembles
the North American continent, with the most striking resemblance being the Gulf of Mexico. But
in Spitzer's infrared view, the continent disappears. Instead, a swirling landscape of dust and
young stars comes into view.

"One of the things that makes me so excited about this image is how different it is from the
visible image, and how much more we can see in the infrared than in the visible," said Luisa
Rebull of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena,
Calif. Rebull is lead author of a paper about the observations, accepted for publication in the
Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. "The Spitzer image reveals a wealth of detail about the
dust and the young stars here."

The new image is online at
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/pia13844.html.

Rebull and her team have identified more than 2,000 new, candidate young stars in the region.
There were only about 200 known before. Because young stars grow up surrounded by blankets
of dust, they are hidden in visible-light images. Spitzer's infrared detectors pick up the glow of
the dusty, buried stars.

A star is born inside a collapsing ball of gas and dust. As the material collapses inward, it flattens
out into a disk that spins around together with the forming star like a spinning top. Jets of gas
shoot perpendicularly away from the disk, above and below it. As the star ages, planets are
thought to form out of the disk -- material clumps together, ultimately growing into mature
planets. Eventually, most of the dust dissipates, aside from a tenuous ring similar to the one in
our solar system, referred to as Zodiacal dust.

The new Spitzer image reveals all the stages of a star's young life, from the early years when it is
swaddled in dust to early adulthood, when it has become a young parent to a family of
developing planets. Sprightly "toddler" stars with jets can also be identified in Spitzer's view.

"This is a really busy area to image, with stars everywhere, from the North American complex
itself, as well as in front of and behind the region," said Rebull. "We refer to the stars that are not
associated with the region as contamination. With Spitzer, we can easily sort this contamination
out and clearly distinguish between the young stars in the complex and the older ones that are
unrelated."

The North American nebula still has a mystery surrounding it, involving its power source.
Nobody has been able to identify the group of massive stars that is thought to be dominating the
nebula. The Spitzer image, like images from other telescopes, hints that the missing stars are
lurking behind the Gulf of Mexico portion of the nebula. This is evident from the illumination
pattern of the nebula, especially when viewed with the detector on Spitzer that picks up 24-
micron infrared light. That light appears to be coming from behind the Gulf of Mexico's dark
tangle of clouds, in the same way that sunlight creeps out from behind a rain cloud.

The nebula's distance from Earth is also a mystery. Current estimates put it at about 1,800 light-
years from Earth. Spitzer will refine this number by finding more stellar members of the North
American complex.

The Spitzer observations were made before it ran out of the liquid coolant needed to chill its
longer-wavelength instruments. Currently, Spitzer's two shortest-wavelength channels (3.6 and
4.5 microns) are still working. The composite image shows light from both the infrared array
camera and multiband imaging processor. Infrared light with a wavelength of 3.6 microns is
color-coded blue; 8.0-micron light is green; and 24-micron light is red.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope
mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted
at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech
manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu/
and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

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